A Langley man was one member of a trio arrested in Surrey after two stolen cars sped through the Fraser Valley early Friday.
The incident began in Chilliwack, where police first apparently tried to stop two stolen Ford Escapes.
The small SUVs headed west down the TransCanada Highway, with officers from a variety of police forces and detachments involved in efforts to stop them. They apparently evaded a roadblock in Langley, and were driving at a very high speed.
Marked police cruises monitored them from a safe distance while the Langley-based Air 1 helicopter followed them from above.
The cars headed into Surrey at about 1 a.m. and left the highway, as Surrey RCMP set up multiple roadblocks to try to head them off, said Cpl. Bert Paquet, a spokesperson for the Surrey Mounties.
At 1:30 a.m., officers were told that one of the cars, a white Escape, had crashed in a ditch near 64th Avenue and 156th Street.
Police arrived at the crash scene and arrested the driver, a 27-year-old from Surrey who was well known to police.
The second car kept going until about 2 a.m., when it pulled into a parking lot in the 7100 block of Hall Road, said Paquet.
Two people got out, a man who had been driving and a woman passenger. They ran west through an alley, but police converged on the area and arrested both suspects with the help of the Police Dog Services team.
The driver is a 34-year-old from Langley and the passenger a 23-year-old from Delta, and both were also known to police, said Paquet.
The three are now facing possible charges of possession of stolen property, flight from police, dangerous driving, and breach of a conditional sentence order. Possible stolen items were also found inside the cars, which are being examined by the Forensic Identification Section.
Paquet noted that during the long route taken by the stolen vehicles, there was never an actual police pursuit of the suspects.