Officers began searching the surrounding area.
One said he had not personally seen the gun.
Another had heard that there was one on the floorboard.
Someone wondered whether the suspects might have thrown weapons out the windows before the crash.
No one wanted to assume that one recovered firearm was the only firearm involved.
Eventually, a weapon was located.
An officer called out that there was a gun.
The scene remained tense.
Later, another firearm was removed from a suspect.
An officer announced that the weapon was secured.
The gun was loaded.
According to the account, there was a full magazine and a round in the chamber.
That discovery changed the emotional temperature of the scene.
The fleeing driver had not simply been trying to escape in a stolen vehicle.
There were guns associated with the occupants.
Police had every reason to continue treating them as potentially dangerous, even while they were injured.
Firefighters worked to free the suspects.
Metal had folded around the passenger.
The vehicle had absorbed the enormous force of the impact.
The people inside had absorbed some of it too.
One suspect’s leg appeared broken.
The other was eventually able to be removed.
Officers planned for one officer to accompany each suspect to the hospital.
The arrest would not be suspended simply because the suspects required medical treatment.
They would remain under police supervision.
At the same time, the innocent victims had already been or were being transported for their own treatment.
The roadway slowly shifted from an active rescue scene toward an investigation scene.
But the officers still did not understand how serious the larger case actually was.
They knew the Ford had been stolen.
They knew the driver had fled.
They knew the pursuit had ended in a violent crash.
They knew firearms had been recovered.
That was already enough to expose J. Marlin to major criminal charges.
Then a phone call came in.
And suddenly, the officers learned that the blue Ford was connected to something much worse.
The car had not simply been taken during a robbery.
The owner had been shot.
According to the account, when the Ford was stolen the previous night, the suspects had confronted the owner.
They ordered him out.
There was a firearm.
Then one of the suspects fired multiple shots.
The victim was hit.
The suspects drove away in his car.
They left him behind bleeding from gunshot wounds.
He was taken to the hospital and required emergency surgery.
Until that information reached the officers at the crash scene, they had largely been dealing with J. Marlin and Rontel as fleeing car-theft and crash suspects.
Now they were looking at two young men potentially connected to a shooting.
One officer immediately warned another.
The suspect he was guarding might be facing murder charges if the shooting victim died.
That meant the young man had very little to lose by attempting to escape again.
Do not leave him alone.
Do not let him out of your sight.
Stay in the hospital room.
Watch his hands.
Be careful around your firearm.
The tone had changed.
The badly injured teenager being transported to the hospital was not simply a reckless driver anymore.
Police now believed they were guarding someone who might soon be accused of taking a life.
The shooting victim’s condition was not yet fully known to the officers.
For all they knew, the man could die.
If he did, a robbery and shooting investigation could become a homicide investigation.
That possibility gave the entire afternoon a darker meaning.
The pursuit no longer looked like two young men panicking because they had been caught in a stolen car.
They may have been fleeing because they knew that the Ford connected them to an armed robbery and a shooting.
From their perspective, stopping for that first officer could have meant far more than a stolen vehicle charge.
It could have exposed everything.
That does not excuse the decision to run.
It makes the decision easier to understand as part of the criminal timeline.
Once the police lights appeared behind the Ford, every mile the suspects drove potentially increased the list of charges.
Failing to stop.
Dangerous speeds.
Reckless driving.
Endangering motorists.
Then the collision.
Then serious injuries.
And eventually, death.
It is one of the recurring patterns in police pursuit cases.
A suspect may begin running because of the crimes he has already committed.
But by running, he creates new crimes.
A stop that might have ended with an arrest becomes a chase.
A chase becomes a crash.
A crash injures innocent people.
And once someone dies, the legal consequences can become dramatically more severe than whatever the suspect originally hoped to escape.
That is exactly what was happening here.
As investigators reconstructed the earlier crimes, they discovered that the December 3 pursuit was not an isolated outburst.
Only days earlier, J. Marlin and Rontel had allegedly been involved in another car theft.
The November 29 incident involved a firearm.
A vehicle owner was threatened.
Her wallet was demanded.
Her vehicle was taken.
Then, a few days later, another vehicle was taken.
This time, the robbery escalated even further.
Shots were fired.
The owner was wounded.
The blue Ford Fusion became the suspects’ transportation.
The next afternoon, a police officer in Solon happened to run the plate.
One random registration check connected all of those events.
Had the officer not checked the Ford, the suspects might have continued driving.
Had the suspects pulled over, the violent crash might never have happened.
Instead, the driver accelerated.
Every decision after that first moment pushed the case toward the intersection where Norman and Sally were traveling.
Back at the crash scene, officers themselves were beginning to process what had happened.
One officer described the terrible feeling of moving through an intersection during the pursuit and seeing an older driver beginning to pull forward.
Lights and sirens were active.
The officer tried to communicate the danger.
Then came the crash.
There is a form of helplessness in those moments that is difficult to understand from a written report.
Police may know a fleeing vehicle is coming.
They may broadcast warnings.
They may use sirens.
They may try to stop cross traffic.
But an eighty-mile-per-hour car can cover a tremendous distance in seconds.
An elderly driver may not hear the siren immediately.
He may not understand where the danger is coming from.
By the time everyone recognizes the threat, there may be no room left to avoid it.
The aftermath was visible everywhere.
Officers were shaken.
Civilians were injured.
The suspects were injured.
Vehicles were destroyed.
And the full consequences still had not arrived.
The gunshot victim from the previous day did survive.
That was good news.
Despite being shot and requiring emergency surgery, he was eventually released from the hospital about a week later.
But survival did not mean his life simply returned to normal.
According to the case account, a bullet remained lodged in his hip.
Medical expenses accumulated.
He created a GoFundMe page to help cover the costs.
His survival also meant that the feared murder charge associated with that shooting did not materialize in the way officers had initially worried it might.
But while one victim survived, another did not.
Sally Schultz died the same night as the crash.
She was 85 years old.