Missouri Woman Caught Stealing a Fire Truck, Crashing It into a Tree

Jade Gibbs allegedly did more than $450,000 in damage to the truck and the fire station

Oct 6, 2023 at 8:03 am

Pettis County Jail

Booking photo of Jade Gibbs from July 2022 arrest.

A Missouri woman is in police custody after allegedly stealing a firetruck and driving it into a tree. As it happens she also seems to possess an Houdini-esque ability to escape from handcuffs.

A little before 8 a.m. on Wednesday, sheriff's deputies in Henry County, about 90 minutes southeast of Kansas City, got word that someone was driving a fire truck through lawns in a residential neighborhood in the small town of Windsor, Missouri.

Deputies arrived on the scene to find the truck smashed into a tree. Behind its wheel was Jade Gibbs, 20, a resident of nearby Ionia. One of the responding officers wrote in a probable cause statement that he recognized Gibbs from "prior encounters."

Gibbs revved the engine causing the truck to "rock back and forth," the deputy wrote. When he announced himself as a deputy, Gibbs made eye contact with him, then shifted the truck into a different gear and revved it again — to no avail.

A bystander pushed Gibbs out of the driver's seat and she took off running.

She didn't make it too far and the deputies soon had the 20-year-old in handcuffs and in the back of a police vehicle.

However , Gibbs managed to slip out of the cuffs, as well as the vehicle she'd been locked in. The deputy who wrote the probable cause statement noted that Gibbs was "profusely sweating." She was cuffed a second time, and a second time escaped from them, this time charging at two deputies and getting in the front seat of their car.

Deputies deployed a Taser. However, the deputy wrote that, "Jade did not respond to the Taser deployment. Jade continued to fight with us." Deputies put leg and belly chains on her in addition to the handcuffs.

"I observed Jade whispering at a rapid rate, but I could not make out what she was saying," the deputy wrote.

She was taken to Henry County Jail and is now facing charges of stealing, burglary, property damage and resisting arrest.

Further investigation at the Windsor Fire Department building turned up a broken window at the station where the firetruck was missing from. It also did not go unnoticed by law enforcement that the station's garage door was "in multiple pieces on the ground," left there presumably after Gibbs drove the truck through it on her way out of the station's garage.

The damage to the truck, garage door and window is estimated to be approximately $450,000.

KMBC reported that the town of Windsor had only one more payment to make on the truck.

Alas, as deputies alluded to, it wasn't Gibbs' first brush with the long arm of the law.

In July 2022, Gibbs and four others were arrested after a search of their house in Ionia turned up a quarter pound of meth and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Gibbs was not charged with drug possession, only resisting arrest. However, at the time she also had warrants for DWI and robbery.