Suspect in Vancouver police vehicle hit-and-run caught in Salmon Creek

A 27-year-old man was arrested Thursday night in the Salmon Creek area following a daylong search for the person who sped away from a Vancouver police officer and struck his patrol vehicle in the process.

Jerry Sakkan of Vancouver was located by officers with the Neighborhood Response Team and Safe Streets Task Force around 6:15 p.m. near Northeast 127th Street, according to a Vancouver Police Department news release.

Sakkan allegedly tried to elude police again and crashed into two Vancouver police vehicles. His vehicle “sustained flat tires after striking a curb, and (a) short pursuit ended when the suspect tried to flee on foot,” the news release states.

He was arrested a short distance away. Sakkan was booked into the Clark County Jail on suspicion of attempting to elude police, hit-and-run on an attended vehicle and hit-and-run on an unattended vehicle. He was also arrested on several felony warrants.

Earlier Thursday, an officer had stopped around 8:30 a.m. to speak with a man who was sitting in the driver’s seat of a Kia SUV parked at an apartment complex in the 3000 block of Northeast 109th Avenue in Vancouver. The officer was outside his vehicle when the man started the SUV and sped away, according to emergency radio traffic monitored at The Columbian. In the process, the driver hit and damaged the officer’s vehicle, police said.

The officer tried to follow him but lost sight of the fleeing vehicle around Northeast 112th Avenue and Burton Road, according to scanner traffic.

The vehicle Sakkan allegedly drove was a 2018 silver Kia SUV. Police said the vehicle was rented from a local company and had a California license plate.