HOSPITAL ESCAPEE IS CAPTURED; FLED IN DUMP TRUCK, THEN IN STOLEN CAR

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Sunday, December 9, 1990

The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | Page A08

A 24-year-old man who escaped from a New York mental hospital by driving a dump truck through a fence and then stole a car in Hackensack was being held in lieu of $15,000 bail in the Bergen County Jail after Atlantic City police captured him Thursday.

Hackensack police charged James Coyle of New City, N.Y., with robbery for stealing the car, and with receiving stolen property the dump truck, which he discarded at a gas station. Atlantic City police charged him with resisting arrest, driving with a revoked driver’s license, and receiving stolen property.

A spokesman for Hackensack Police Chief William Iurato said charges are also pending against Coyle in New York in the theft of the dump truck.

Coyle had been involuntarily committed to the Rockland County Psychiatric Hospital in Orangeburg, N.Y., on Dec. 3, according to a police report by Hackensack Detective Sgt. Hugh J. Farley.

Shortly after dawn Thursday, while workers from P & H Construction Co. of Wanaque were repairing the sewer system on hospital grounds, Coyle allegedly stole the dump truck, which had a trailer attached, and drove it through a fence.

At about noon that day, the truck arrived in Hackensack and pulled into the Exxon gas station at the corner of Johnson Avenue and Orchard Street, Farley said in the report. John Packard, 57, of 630 Main St. was at the pump filling his 1979 Cadillac with gas when Coyle arrived, he said.

Coyle knocked Packard to the ground, finished pumping the gas, and took off in the Cadillac, driving south on Johnson Avenue, police said. After Packard made a report of the robbery, Hackensack police alerted other police departments with a description of the car and Coyle.

At about 6:30 p.m. on the same day, Atlantic City Police Officer Donald Barker responded to a report that a patron at a gas station had refused to pay.

ID: 17326155 | Copyright © 1990, The Record (New Jersey)


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