Police chase ended with a state trooper in handcuffs after he used stop sticks to flatten the tire of his bomb squad truck en route to a serious call

Some law enforcement stories are troubling because they show violence. Others are troubling because they show confusion. This one manages to do both, while also sounding almost too unbelievable to be real.

In a report for WAVE News, troubleshooter Mark Stevens laid out how a late-September police chase in southern Indiana ended with officers using stop sticks on a speeding pickup truck, drawing guns, ordering the driver to the ground, and handcuffing him on the roadside – only to discover that the man they had just treated like a fleeing suspect was actually an Indiana State Police bomb squad trooper rushing to a serious call.

That detail alone is bad enough.

But Stevens’ report makes clear that the real problem was not just one mistaken stop. It was a cascading failure of communication involving local police, dispatchers, state police information, and a truck that, according to the trooper himself, had its lights and sirens on the entire time.

By the end of it, a bomb squad truck had a shredded tire, a trooper had lost critical time, and the officers on scene were left trying to explain how they managed to stop the very person who was supposed to be responding to an emergency.

A Chase That Started With Suspicion

Mark Stevens said the whole incident began near a gas station in Austin, Indiana, where an Austin police officer was assisting with a broken-down car.

While there, the officer saw an unmarked white pickup truck with a camper shell pass by with red and blue lights and sirens activated. That immediately raised suspicion. According to the radio traffic Stevens included in his report, the officer told dispatch they had “absolutely nothing” on their system identifying the truck.

That uncertainty set everything else in motion.

Instead of assuming it was a legitimate emergency vehicle, officers asked Scott County dispatchers to contact Indiana State Police. Stevens reported that the answer that came back was a crucial one: state police units were said to be at a meeting at the post, meaning, in the minds of local officers, this truck could not belong to them.

Once that information was passed along, the entire situation tilted in the wrong direction.

At that point, Austin police began chasing the truck just outside town. And from there, Stevens showed how a bad assumption hardened into a full police pursuit involving multiple agencies.

The Bomb Squad Trooper Was Never the Suspect

As the pursuit moved north on Indiana 39, Jackson County sheriff’s deputies and Brownstown police joined in.

Mark Stevens reported that officers even ran the license plate and got a return showing the vehicle was registered to the Department of Administration out of Indianapolis, meaning it was a state fleet vehicle. That should have been a clue. Instead, according to the dispatch audio, no one seemed to know quite what to make of it.

One dispatcher, as Stevens recounted, said the return only seemed to indicate a state purchasing function, and the significance of the fleet registration apparently never clicked in time.

That is one of the most frustrating parts of the whole story.

A truck with emergency lights and sirens. A state fleet registration. A driver later identified as Trooper Rick Stockdale. Those are not tiny details buried in the background. Those are the kinds of facts that should have slowed this pursuit down and triggered a far more careful verification process before anyone escalated to a roadside takedown.

Instead, the chase kept building.

Meanwhile, Stockdale himself had realized he was being followed. Stevens reported that the trooper radioed his own dispatch asking if Jackson County had units trying to catch up to him “running hot,” which suggests that, from his side, he was already trying to understand why local officers were closing in on a bomb squad truck headed to a call.

That makes the whole thing feel even more absurd.

The man being chased was not hiding his identity. He was trying to get where he was needed.

Stop Sticks, Guns Drawn, and Handcuffs on the Roadside

The most dramatic part of Mark Stevens’ report came when the pursuit reached a sharp curve where Brownstown police set stop sticks.

The plan worked. The truck hit the sticks, and the front tire was shredded. Then the scene shifted instantly from pursuit to felony stop. Officers drew their weapons, shouted commands, and ordered Stockdale out at gunpoint.

What followed, as shown in the footage Stevens obtained, was the kind of roadside arrest sequence usually reserved for an armed suspect.

Stockdale was ordered to move backward, get on his knees, and place his hands behind his head. He tried to explain in real time what was happening. Stevens quoted him saying, “I’m a state police officer, bomb squad, going to a call.” But by then the officers were already committed to the stop.

That commitment is understandable at a certain point in any tense police encounter, but it is also exactly what makes earlier mistakes so dangerous.

Once officers believe they are dealing with a stolen or impersonating emergency vehicle, it becomes very hard to unwind the moment calmly. The scene takes on its own momentum. Guns are drawn, commands are shouted, and everyone is now operating under the pressure of a perceived threat.

In this case, Stevens showed, that momentum put a real trooper in handcuffs on the side of the road while his bomb call sat waiting.

Then the Dispatchers Realized the Truth

Eventually, the dots connected.

Stevens reported that a state police dispatcher named Christi got back on the line and told Scott County that she had just figured out the truck was indeed one of their own units, headed to a bomb call. One dispatcher responded with an incredulous “OMG,” while another could be heard asking why that had not been communicated earlier, especially since, as the audio suggests, the information had apparently been raised more than once.

That moment changes the story from a mistaken traffic stop into a communications breakdown with real consequences.

Because once the truth came out, the officers on scene immediately understood what had happened. One Austin officer apologized for the “big mishap.” Another, in the kind of candid line that makes local reporting valuable, admitted bluntly that he had just “spiked a state cop.”

That line would almost be funny if the situation were not so serious.

A bomb squad unit was delayed, an armed takedown was carried out on the wrong person, and the system that was supposed to sort out basic identification failed badly enough that local police treated a responding emergency unit as a possible criminal threat.

That is not just embarrassing. It is operationally dangerous.

“Lights and Sirens Were On”

Another state trooper, Mark Naylor, arrived to investigate the incident, and Stevens reported that Naylor then interviewed every officer involved while Stockdale changed his damaged tire on the roadside.

That image alone says a lot about the tone of the aftermath. The man who had just been chased, spiked, and cuffed was now kneeling by his own bomb truck changing a tire so he could continue to the call that all of this had delayed.

And he was still trying to make one point clear.

According to Stevens, Stockdale told the Austin officer to make sure the report got one thing right: “Lights and sirens. They were on. That’s the biggest thing.” That insistence matters because it goes directly to the core factual dispute that should shape how anyone judges this mess.

If the truck truly had its emergency lights and sirens activated the whole time, then the bar for launching a multi-agency pursuit should have been much higher than what appears to have happened here.

An officer on scene said they had suspected the vehicle might be stolen or used by someone impersonating law enforcement. That concern is not irrational on its face. Officers do have to take fake police vehicles seriously. But Stevens’ reporting suggests the problem was not that officers were cautious. It was that they were cautious too late and sloppy too early.

They escalated before they verified.

A Serious Call Delayed for No Good Reason

By the time the roadside confusion was over, Stockdale finally headed off again with his lights and sirens.

Mark Stevens reported that he reached the bomb call about two hours after the suspicious device had first been reported. In the end, the bomb squad did not file a report because the suspected pipe bomb at Monroe Lake Dam turned out not to be an explosive device.

That fact may have spared everyone from an even worse outcome.

But it should not soften how serious the delay was. Emergency responses do not get judged by how lucky the final result turns out to be. They get judged by whether systems worked the way they were supposed to when time mattered. Here, by Stevens’ telling, the answer is clearly no.

None of the departments involved agreed to on-camera interviews with WAVE to explain what went wrong.

Jackson County Sheriff Rick Meyer did say the department can hear local channels but not all traffic, while Indiana State Police similarly said it is impractical to monitor every channel because it would drown out their own radio traffic. No department, Stevens noted, answered whether they could hail one another directly.

That silence may be the most revealing part of the whole story.

Because this was not really about one truck or one bad stop. It was about systems that did not talk clearly enough to each other, agencies that acted on incomplete assumptions, and a chain of decisions that ended with the wrong man in handcuffs and the right mission pushed back.

By the end of the report, Naylor could be heard saying, “Let’s all get outta here and forget this mess.”

That may be what some of the departments wanted.

But Mark Stevens’ reporting makes it hard to forget, and probably harder still to excuse.