Deputies arrested a Santa Rosa man suspected of breaking into a woman’s home and attacking her in Camp Meeker before he led officers on a roughly six-mile car chase until the suspect lost a tire and spun out Saturday night, according to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office’s Facebook page.
The online statement said the dispatch center received a 911 call reporting the attack at about 5:15 p.m. on Jan. 9. The deputies headed to the woman’s home on the 5000 block of Bohemian Highway and found out the man threw chairs at the victim and throttled her, it said.
The Camp Meeker Volunteer Fire Department and an American Medical Response ambulance responded to their call to treat the woman’s injuries, Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Misti Wood said.
Wood said the woman told deputies her attacker was 43-year-old Tai Kincaid of Santa Rosa. She and her neighbors who heard her calls for help and came over provided officers a description of his car.
“He broke in through a locked door, so that’s how he got into the home,” Wood said. She said the suspect and the victim know each other, although they are not romantically involved, and the Sheriff’s Office does not know why he attacked the woman.
Wood said she did not want to share how the suspect and the victim know each other so she could protect the victim’s identity.
According to the online statement, the assailant drove away when a neighbor arrived at the victim’s home upon hearing her calls for help. Someone on Green Hill Road called the dispatch center about 15 minutes later to inform them the suspect just left a property on the road acting intoxicated.
The caller identified the suspect to the Sheriff’s Office and provided the suspect’s car description and license plate number, Wood said. She said the caller had just interacted with the suspect on the Green Hill Road property, but that to protect the caller’s identity, she could not go on the record detailing their encounter.
“I think the safest thing I can say is that the person on Green Hill Road and the suspect interacted when the suspect was on that individual’s property,” she said.
Wood said the interaction was unrelated to the Camp Meeker attack but connected to the overall case in that the time, location and other information the caller provided was relevant to the deputies’ pursuit. More deputies joined the search for Kincaid, the online statement said.
One deputy discovered Kincaid’s parked car in the 4800 block of Occidental Road, but Kincaid drove off after the deputy exited his patrol car and told him not to move, according to the statement.
Wood said the suspect drove through the public streets near the Santa Rosa Golf & Country Club. According to the statement, after “reaching speeds up to 70 miles per hour and going through several stop signs,” the suspect drove across a spike strip deputies set up at the intersection of Occidental Road and Sanford Road, puncturing his tires.
But Kincaid sped westbound on Occidental Road and through a red light at the intersection of Occidental Road and Highway 116 “and then after that is when one of the wheels fell off and he crashed,” Wood said.
The spokesperson said she understood the car to have struck a garbage can as it spun out, before it came to halt on the 8700 block of Occidental Road.
The Facebook report said Kincaid continuously dropped his hands out of sight and wouldn’t leave the car when deputies told him to show his hands and exit the vehicle, and deputies then deployed a foam projectile to break a rear car window “in case they had to get into the car quickly.”
Deputies then took him into custody “without further incident,” the statement said and Wood said the report offered little detail other than that she could confirm deputies did not have to resort to use of force on Kincaid.
According to the online statement, authorities booked Kincaid into the county jail on seven felonies, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, two counts of burglary, and one count each for vandalism, elder abuse and evading peace officers.
While Kincaid faces a count for assault likely to cause great bodily injury and another for assault with a deadly weapon, Wood said there was no mention of a firearm in the report. The charges are probably related to throwing chairs and strangling the woman, who is over the age of 65, she said, classifying the attack as elder abuse.
“The vandalism was due to the damage within the victim’s home,” Wood said. The suspect broke a number of items in the woman’s home and may have damaged the chairs he threw, in addition to damaging the door’s lock when he broke in, “which supports the burglary charge and also the vandalism charge on which he was arrested,” Wood said.
However, the suspect did not steal anything from the woman’s home as far as sheriffs are aware, she said. He faces charges of burglary under Penal Code 459 and 469(a) because they believe he broke into the residential property intending to commit a felony, she said.
Wood said a local judge set his bail at $500,000 after granting a bail enhancement at the Sheriff’s Office’s request.
Wood said the police report did not say whether deputies found the suspect was in fact under the influence of any particular substance, although he was medically cleared before he was booked into county jail because he was in a car crash.
