A man believed to be intoxicated was arrested in Rialto after he allegedly stole a car from a medically compromised victim and deliberately crashed it into a police vehicle.
The suspect, 23-year-old David Lawrence Cordova III, was booked for multiple charges at West Valley Detention Center. His initial charges included attempted murder and resisting police, with additional charges to follow regarding the carjacking. His bail was set at $1 million.
The initial incident took place close to noon on Wednesday, June 22nd. A female suffering with a medical condition was sitting in her parked car, a black 2019 Nissan Sentra, outside a medical clinic in the 500 block of Mt. Vernon Avenue in San Bernardino. She was then “violently attacked by Cordova when he opened her car door as she was in the driver seat, with the vehicle running,” according to Rialto Police Cpl. Nic Parcher. “Cordova struck the victim in her head several times with her own cane before pulling her out of the vehicle by her hair and driving away in her car.”
Around that same time, Rialto police were at the scene of a traffic collision, in which a woman had run into a telephone pole with her car in the 3300 block of North Riverside Avenue. Officers were completing paperwork in their parked vehicle with its emergency lights on when “their driver-side door was violently struck by another vehicle causing the airbags to deploy and both officers being trapped inside,” said Cpl. Parcher. Witnesses later informed police that the driver had “appeared to deliberately swerve toward the officers’ patrol vehicle.”
After the collision, the driver of the vehicle—Cordova—got out of the car and “acted erratically,” according to witnesses. “Cordova was in the middle of the street, yelling incoherently and displaying signs and symptoms of being under the influence of narcotics.”
Additional officers responded to the scene but could not immediately apprehend Cordova, who injured one officer while resisting arrest.
Cordova was finally apprehended and taken to a hospital for treatment of injuries caused by the collision. The two officers trapped inside the vehicle were freed after several minutes, and they—along with the officer injured while trying to arrest Cordova—also received treatment for their injuries at a local hospital. Each of the officers was discharged later that evening.
