Here’s one pastor you don’t want to mess with
Pastor Joel Jones was traveling on Interstate 80 with his wife, AnnaLisa, when a startling sight unfolded in front of them: A pickup truck was pinballing down the freeway, causing crashes and spinouts and terrifying other motorists as the driver coolly smoked a cigarette.
At one point, Jones said, he had to swerve around a wreck left in the truck’s wake Saturday morning, and his instincts as a former Oakland cop and San Francisco Sheriff’s sergeant
kicked in.
“I thought, ‘This guy’s going to kill somebody.’ Somebody should at least put this on the radio and call 911,” Jones said. “We called 911 but couldn’t make out the (license) plate. But I could keep the truck in sight, because I felt at that point he might try to get off the freeway, and he should be held accountable.”
But the 61-year-old Jones, a Fairfield resident in his second calling as a pastor at Spirit of Truth Church Worldwide in Crockett alongside his pastor wife, ended up doing much more to hold the driver accountable.
He is being praised for fighting off the driver, a San Jose man, who authorities say savagely assaulted a California Highway Patrol officer responding to the trail of freeway demolition.
“We are very appreciative and thankful for his assistance,” said CHP Sgt. Kevin Duncan of the Solano area field office.
Duncan added that the injured female officer is “doing OK, still sore and recovering.”
Surge of adrenaline
From eyewitness accounts, it could be easily argued that Jones made the difference in preventing the encounter from turning deadly.
Keeping people safe, an instinct refined by his previous law-enforcement career, was definitely on his mind as he tried to keep pace with the wayward pickup. For a few stretches he found himself driving parallel with the suspect, who he said seemed eerily calm.
“He didn’t seem drunk. He was smoking a cigarette. There’s a mass of destruction behind him. He’s a wrecking crew smoking a cigarette,” Jones said. “I thought, ‘He must be out of his mind.’ ”
At some point, the truck slowed to a coast and then a crawl, apparently damaged by at least two crashes. A CHP officer caught up to the truck, which came to a stop in the far-left lane of westbound I-80 in American Canyon.
Jones remembers the officer shouting orders over a loudspeaker, telling the driver to get out of his vehicle.
“When he stepped out of the car, as soon as he saw it was a female officer, he started moving swiftly toward her,” Jones said. “She told him to stay back. He rushed her.”
With the officer still partially in her vehicle’s door well, both Jones and CHP accounts say, the man punched her and knocked her to the ground, where he proceeded to kick her.
“He was pummeling her and stomping her,” Jones said. “I thought the next thing he’s going to do is get (her) gun. I rushed him. What I got to do is get him away from the gun.”
The surge of adrenaline helped the former college football player — in Iowa in the 1970s — who said, “The Lord put his strength in me.”
“I don’t know if I hit him with my forearm or grabbed him by the neck, but we both flew off her. When we flew, his feet were in the air, and I felt good about that because he’s away from her,” Jones said. “I got him on his face and held him down, then other people came.”
Jones, 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds, soon was helped with subduing the similarly sized suspect by other good Samaritans. One man helped secure the suspect’s torso, and another held his arms.
All the while, his wife tended to the dazed officer, whom Jones described as being “very in shock.”
A second CHP officer arrived at the scene to handcuff the suspect, identified as 49-year-old San Jose resident Gary Emil Coslovich, who is jailed in Solano County on suspicion of offenses including assaulting a police officer and attempted murder.
As Coslovich was hauled off, Jones said he heard the man mutter an odd remark.
“He said, ‘We’re all works in progress,’ ” Jones said.
Did what he had to do
As a man who now trades in forgiveness, Jones said he was sympathetic but also recognized the danger to which he and others were exposed.
“Yeah, but that’s not the way to progress. You could have killed two people. This officer could have been killed,” Jones recalls telling Coslovich.
Since the encounter, Jones said he has been shown appreciation by the injured officer’s colleagues and even her brother.
When contacted by this news organization, the Chicago native — who claims growing up not far from a pre-celebrity Mr. T. in the 1960s — voiced a preference to stay under the radar before agreeing to tell his story.
He called it a simple case of doing what he would have wanted someone to do for him.
“Nobody would want to be in that position and not receive help. If we don’t help, what good are we being here?” Jones said. “God put us on that road on that time for that purpose.”