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On May 26, at 1:57 a.m., Montgomery County Police Sgt. Patrick Kepp clocked a green Dodge Challenger going 136 mph down Interstate 270. He gave chase, according to court records, hitting 140 mph himself while using his lights and siren to try to pull the car over.
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But the Challenger kept going — exiting and reentering I-270, swerving among lanes and zooming past an active road construction site with its flashing yellow lights, the records said. “Due to the extreme danger posed by the vehicle and its reckless driving,” Kepp later wrote in an arrest warrant, the sergeant decided to terminate the pursuit and issued a lookout over his radio.
The warrant led to the arrest of 19-year-old Raphael Mayorga. By this month he was out of jail, pending trial, and early Wednesday morning had returned to what police say had become a dangerous routine: Driving at extremely high, reckless speeds late into the night, and hoping to bait police into chases.
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Officers spotted him and his Challenger at 3:48 a.m., gunning up and down I-270 at over 110 mph. Kepp was again on duty, and decided with his colleagues to try to park ahead of the Challenger and lay down tire-puncturing stop sticks.
Mayorga barreled in closer.
“He saw Sergeant Kepp,” prosecutor James Dietrich said in court Thursday. “He swerved towards him and basically crushed his legs.”
That Kepp had — months earlier — tried to stop the same young driver, who now is charged with nearly killing him this week, has not been lost on the more than 1,000 sworn officers in his department.
“He was out there doing his job in May and doing his job Wednesday night,” said Lee Holland, president of the county’s police union. “They were all trying to do anything they could — knowing this guy wasn’t going to stop.”
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After the collision, Mayorga kept going, was stopped by another set of stop sticks, tried to run away and was caught, police said. Police charged him with attempted first-degree murder.
Mayorga’s attorney, assistant public defender Nahim Kashani, did not address the specific allegations in court Thursday. She did ask Montgomery District Judge Zuberi B. Williams to release Mayorga to home detention with his parents under electronic monitoring. Williams declined, saying he was concerned about public safety.
The public defender’s office declined to comment after court. Mayorga’s family members could not be reached for comment.
Deploying stop sticks itself can be dangerous, according to Holland. Officers throw the long devices across a roadway, he said, reel them into position, and then reel them in further after the target car hopefully drives over them. Doing all that requires officers to be close to traffic, according to Holland.
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He called Kepp, who also supervises a unit that targets drunk drivers, one of the most active officers on the force. Kepp’s condition has been improving, a police spokesman said, and he was alert and talking Wednesday night.
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According to Montgomery District Court filings, police say Mayorga has been involved in about a dozen driving incidents. Four of them since April were described in court Thursday and are detailed in the filings.
“Each circumstance was the same facts,” Dietrich said, “where Mr. Mayorga was baiting police officers to engage in a chase with him. Often those chases ended in the police cutting them off because he was engaging in such reckless behavior.”
Officers got to know him so well, Dietrich said, that they sometimes called him during the chases to get him to stop. Sometimes Mayorga would deny he was in a racing car. Other times, according to the prosecutor, he’d dare them to try to catch him.
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At least recently, according to court records and Thursday’s hearings, Mayorga did not have a driver’s license and was driving alone with a learner’s permit.
According to court records, on April 28 at 2:40 a.m., Mayorga was standing outside a newer model orange Chevrolet Camaro in a Royal Farms convenience store parking lot in Gaithersburg and spotted a police car. Mayorga climbed in the Camaro, peeled out and raced through red lights on his way to I-270, records say. Police eventually aborted any efforts to stop him.
Three weeks later, police alleged, Mayorga drove the Challenger alongside a Gaithersburg officer, made eye contact with him and accelerated away squealing his tires. Over two nights, court records said, he drove at high speeds in the area — turning his lights off, ignoring traffic signals and fleeing attempted stops by officers, police alleged in court papers.
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On May 23, driving a 2021 silver Toyota Supra, Mayorga passed the Gaithersburg police station and gunned his engine, police allege in court papers. A sergeant followed him in his cruiser and called him.
“Mayorga confirmed that he was driving the Supra and was warned again … not to drive recklessly, not to attempt to bait police into pursuits and not to drive without the supervision required by his Maryland Leaner’s Permit,” officers wrote in court documents.
Much of what Mayorga was allegedly doing, while alarming, appears to amount to traffic infractions rather than criminal ones. Police did deliver citations to his home. It was not immediately clear, based on online court records, how or why Mayorga was not being held in jail by this month as the charges were being sorted out.
Dietrich, the prosecutor, said in court that on Wednesday morning — before being stopped by the police — Mayorga had engaged in a high-speed race on I-270.
“Afterwards, he found police officers again, baited them into a chase, revving his engine, speeding away at high speeds,” Dietrich said.
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