Stop and Go — to Jail

Shorewood police Officer John Coldwater was just pulling back onto Jefferson Street from the Jewel parking lot after helping a locked out motorist when he saw a carload of young men pass by, and not one of them was wearing a seat belt.

Coldwater got behind the vehicle and followed it to the Interstate 55 frontage road, where he tried to pull it over. The driver seemed at first to cooperate, as he slowed down and pulled into a parking lot. But instead of stopping, the car pulled back out, blew two stop signs and got on 55.

Coldwater kept up with the car but when it reached Interstate 80 and nearly ran a cement truck off the road, he broke off the pursuit.

But Coldwater got the car's tag number and a good look at all its occupants. And the next night, he and other Shorewood officers went with the Joliet police to raid a house on that town's east side.

"At the search warrant, I immediately identified two people from the car," Coldwater said. And those two men were taken into custody and booked into the Will County jail.

The driver of the car Coldwater tried to stop, 21-year-old David Magana, was charged with fleeing police and a passenger — Eduardo Almazan, 19 — was picked up on a warrant for possession of drug equipment, officials said.

Two guns tossed out of the car during the chase were recovered, police said, and one of them was linked to the burglary of a New Lenox gun shop.

Coldwater put the law on the trail of the fugitives when he started tailing them on Jefferson Street, and that wasn't the first time he cracked a big case through traffic enforcement.

Just a year before, he pulled over a car for a seat belt violation and ended up arresting three young men who had just committed a burglary.

"That was my first stop of the night," Coldwater recalled, telling how on that occasion he was working a traffic detail as part of the state's Beyond the Belt seat belt program.

And in addition to making the arrests, Coldwater made an impression on at least one of the young men.

"He said that straightened his life out," Coldwater remembered.

Shorewood police Sgt. Jason Barten credited Coldwater for his work in the two cases.

"Some of it's being in the right place at the right time," Barten said, "some of it's going above and beyond the regular traffic stop."