An Indiana man discovered Sunday morning in a Gratiot County gas station parking lot —passed out in a car police say he stole— said he has no recollection of a night likely filled with drug use, back road driving and an earlier car crash.
Gratuit County Sheriff’s officials were sent to a home in Sumner Township after 5 a.m. Sunday for a report of stolen car, said Sheriff Doug Wright.
While investigators were working in Sumner, dispatchers asked that police head to the Citgo gas station at the corner of State and Lincoln Streets, where a caller found a man passed out in a parked vehicle.
Officers from the St. Louis Police Department and Mobile Medical Response workers assisting the GCSO found 39-year-old Timothy Brady and attempted to wake him.
“When he finally woke, he became physically aggressive and combative,” Wright said. “He ran and had to be apprehended and restrained.”
When police searched the car —which matched the description of the car reported missing in Sumner— they found unidentified pills, marijuana residue and a substance that tested positive as methamphetamine.
“The suspect said he has no knowledge of what happened and that he blacked out sometime the night before,” Wright said.
Brady had been staying with a friend in Sumner when he borrowed the friend’s car “driving around Montcalm and Gratiot Counties using pills, marijuana and meth,” when he crashed the car into trees and a building, Wright said.
He abandoned that car —police located it on Sunday— and walked less than a quarter of mile before coming across the vehicle reported stolen Sunday morning, ultimately ending his trip at the gas station.
After being apprehended, Brady was first taken to a hospital for evaluation and for treatment of minor injuries before being lodged in the jail.
“He’s spent a good deal of time doing nothing but seeping in a cell,” Wright said. “(A medical professional) has seen him numerous times, but he’s still not 100 percent....probably because of the drug use.”
Brady was arrested and arraigned Monday on one charge of unlawful driving away of an automobile and one charge of methamphetamine possession.
Bond was set at $50,000 and he remains lodged in the Gratiot County Jail; police are waiting on lab results to close the investigation and more charges could be pending, Wright said.