Woman arrested for hitting firefighters with stolen truck
Several warrants issued for suspect in recent years
It wasn’t the fire alarm, but rather thieves that brought Fire Station 9 to life early New Year’s Eve morning.
Albuquerque police said a trio had been cruising around in two stolen Ford F350 trucks, and they had their eyes on another one that belonged to a firefighter who works at the station near Menaul and Eubank NE.
At around 5:30 a.m. Saturday, firefighters at the station heard a window break outside and saw someone rummaging through one of their trucks.
“They shout out the window, ‘Hey, get away from the vehicle,’ and then they come out and by then ... they had all scattered into one (truck) and drove off,” Albuquerque Fire Chief David Downey said in an interview outside the station later in the day.
The suspects got away but, at around 7:15 a.m., firefighters spotted one of them — a woman — walking up an alley toward the station. She got in the stolen truck the group had left behind.
Three firefighters approached and Downey said one was struck when the woman sped off in reverse. A commander in the department then blocked the road with a fire department Chevrolet Tahoe. The woman crashed into the Tahoe. Both firefighters are OK, Downey said. “For some reason, people don’t think property crime offenders are dangerous,” Police Chief Gorden Eden said at a news conference.
Firefighters and neighbors were able to hold the woman down until police arrived and took her into custody.
“They described her to me as confrontational and threatening. ‘We’ll be back’ — that kind of language,” Downey said.
Officers who responded said the woman refused to give them her name.
“And then another officer said, ‘That’s Jennifer Christensen, I’ve dealt with her before,’” officer Simon Drobik said.
Eden said Christensen, 32, was wanted on six warrants in Bernalillo County and one in Torrance County. A state courts website shows that, in 2011, Christensen pleaded no contest in a plea deal for several felony cases against her. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but eight years were suspended.
Several warrants have been issued for her in recent years for violating probation, the most recent in August, the website shows.
Christensen complained of having an injury and Drobik said she was taken to a local hospital.
He said she will be booked into jail on suspicion of two counts of aggravated battery and one count of receiving or transferring a stolen motor vehicle.