A wild police chase through two Kentucky counties ended with a police officer hugging a terrified driver even after pulling a gun on her. Latrece Curry, 41, was running from a domestic dispute with her husband, but the Hodgenville Police Department wanted to track her down. At that point, she took off out of fear.
- Latrece Curry was visibly scared. In bodycam footage shared by the department on Facebook, Curry can be seen stopped in a car park. Officers draw their guns and point them at her, asking her to show her hands and exit the car. That’s when Chief James Richardson got involved.
- She was “shaking like a leaf.” Chief Richardson told The Post that it was clear Curry was terrified and feared for her life. As a Black woman surrounded by white officers with guns trained at her, this sadly made a lot of sense. “I got to the driver’s side door and told her to unlock the door, she had her hands up, she was shaking like a leaf,” Richardson recalled. “I mean the poor girl, when I opened the door it was like a look of sheer terror. She was scared to death.”
- Richardson put his gun away and tried to calm Latrece Curry down. He says he helped her get her seatbelt off since she was shaking too badly to do it herself. “I didn’t perceive her as a threat, she didn’t have any weapons. I took control of her hands, she started crying,” he said. “She reached out and hugged me and I just kind of hugged her back.”
- She did have to be arrested. Officers did take her into custody and charged her with fleeing police, traffic violations, and endangerment. Sadly, this led to a five-year prison sentence, which seems pretty harsh considering the scope of her “crime” and her lack of a criminal record. Richardson said: “Her statement to me was she was just in the zone, she didn’t know what she was doing and she was extremely sorry. She had no criminal record to speak of, had never been in trouble that I know of. She just made a really bad choice… with everything going on in the world today, everybody makes mistakes.”
