Every cop knows there’s no such thing as a routine traffic stop. But police officer Sekou Reid-Bey, who pulled over a jeep in Camden, New Jersey, on the morning of March 5, could hardly have anticipated what would happen next. From nowhere, a young drug addict snuck into Reid-Bey’s squad car behind his back and drove off in it, breaking the officer’s leg as he sped away. The addict circled the block, stopping to pick up his girlfriend, who was waiting nearby. Then the pair tore off, leading police on a high-tension, high-speed chase across state lines into Philadelphia, which was captured on camera by local news helicopters and became the Internet sensation of the day.
Law enforcement officers at this early stage were laying odds on the couple being high on PCP, locally known as “wet.”
After roaring across the Ben Franklin Bridge pursued by police at speeds of up to 100 mph, Blake Bills, 24, and his fiancée Shayna Sykes, 23, were finally pulled over in North Philadelphia. Unbelievably, while the cops were apprehending Bills, Sykes managed to slip away and steal a second police car. She led law enforcement on another dangerous chase, this time through a residential neighborhood, where Sykes ping-ponged off parked cars before bailing from the wrecked vehicle and making a brief run for it as cops swarmed her.
“It’s a bizarre case,” said Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross at a press conference. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
In a Philadelphia courtroom yesterday Sykes recounted talking to Bills about getting clean in the days before their blowout spree. “Ok,” Bills told her. “Let’s go out with a bang.”
Some drugs are known to produce outrageous, criminal behavior. And some addicts are more prone to committing crimes than others. It can be difficult to anticipate when a drug run will go haywire and wind up in the news, or to what degree addiction or other factors determine how events like this unfold. Researchers assure us that the relationship between addiction and criminality is highly complex and variable, involving individual brain chemistries interacting with individual substances—all of it dependent on individual addicts’ childhood and current environments. But after a rocket ride across the front page, the public is usually left to think that addicts are just unpredictable criminals who are liable to do anything for a hit. How to explain why some drug runs go spectacularly wrong?
Criminologists have wrestled for years with the question of why some addicts commit major crimes (other than drug crimes) and others don’t. Researchers have identified three different types of relationships between crime and drug use.
Firstly, there are crimes committed because the user is under the influence of a drug that creates a type of intoxication that more often leads to crime.
Secondly, there are crimes committed against person or property because an addicted user needs money to buy more drugs.
Thirdly, there are crimes linked to the drug trade, perpetrated by traffickers settling scores against one another.
In the case of Sykes and Bills, law enforcement was anticipating the first type of association: the “pharmacological” link. When psychosis is induced by a drug like PCP, for instance, it may cause a user, suffering paranoid delusions or hallucinations, to commit a crime they likely wouldn’t have committed had they not been under the drug’s influence. Alcohol has an even stronger correlation with violent crime than PCP; heroin and marijuana show weaker correlations. Researchers theorize that alcohol’s impact on neurotransmitters may cause a small subset of heavy drinkers to become violent, and there’s also a correlation between violent crimes and proximity to drinking establishments or liquor stores. Meetings of recovering addicts are filled with remorseful anecdotes about pharmacologically-linked crimes, where otherwise law-abiding drug users come out of blackouts in handcuffs and staring down major legal consequences.
There were no doubts from almost the start of the Sykes-Bills investigation that drugs had driven the duo’s crime binge, but which substance they’d been high on was a matter of bemused speculation for both the media and law enforcement. The day after their arrest, their exploits were water-cooler material at Philly’s probation building, where authorities were awaiting information from the duo’s bail interviews. Law enforcement officers at this early stage were laying odds on the couple being high on PCP, locally known as “wet,” a hallucinogen that has recently been a major driver of crime in Camden, including some horrific murders. When news leaked that the couple had instead been on a four-day heroin run, many law enforcement officers were surprised and a bit dismayed; heroin users aren’t known for engaging in high-profile violent crime.
Heroin users, however, are more susceptible than alcohol users to what researchers call the “economic compulsive” crime link—when painful withdrawal symptoms or intense psychological craving drive them to steal to acquire money or goods to exchange for drugs. The type of crime depends on the individual; researchers say that heroin users who are willing to commit violent crimes in the pursuit of getting high are more likely to have been delinquents prior to using heroin. Some heroin addicts with no prior history of violent or delinquent behavior may resort to retail theft or kiting a bad check to keep a run going, but would never knock over a liquor store.
It appears that they were upping their criminal ante, taking bigger risks for drug money, well before the big chase.
A very small number of those heroin addicts with preexisting histories of delinquency will resort to major crimes like stealing two police cars and running an officer down. But these drug-using criminals are themselves far from representative of the overall population of drug users: Relatively few users even become addicted to drugs in the first place, and fewer still become addicted so desperately that they exhaust all legitimate means of funding their use and resort to petty crime, let alone major, possibly violent crimes.
These facts tend to get lost in the largely sensational coverage of such events. Reporters were quick to quote the colorful description of the duo by Camden Police Chief Scott Thompson, who dubbed them, “Our junkie version of Bonnie and Clyde.” It’s doubtful that Thompson appreciated the irony in comparing Sykes and Bills to the famous crime couple who flourished in an underworld fueled by financial depression and the black market for alcohol in the Prohibition Era—in some ways mirroring modern-day Camden and its heroin corners.
The road to the couple’s crime spree hadn’t started that morning. Before becoming Camden’s Most Wanted, Bills and Sykes were a couple of young partygoers, relative newcomers to the Philly nightlife scene who met at a local hipster burger joint where they both worked. Their public Twitter feeds paint a portrait of attention-seekers who talked a lot of shit, bragging about their sexual exploits and getting high. Bills was originally from South Jersey, and may have known the North Camden dope corners by the time he met Sykes, who, according to family members, was consumed with boredom at the age of 21 and had split cow town, as she once called it on Twitter, for the big city. Sykes had only been in Philly roughly a year when she displayed her grasp on local street lingo, posting a photo of her new high-top sneakers and telling a friend that she “copped these jawns.”
The couple presumably fell out of their Philly digs after blowing the rent money on drugs. They moved to Sykes’ grandmother’s house in Macungie, an Allentown suburb. It appears that they were upping their criminal ante, taking bigger risks for drug money, well before the big chase. Having first used their restaurant wages to get high, the two likely moved to Macungie to save money on rent that could be used for drugs. There, Bills proceeded to get pinched pulling a burglary for dope money in August 2012.
Days before the events of March 5, they stole Sykes’ grandmother’s car. Then they surfaced on the night of March 3 in North Camden, where police stopped them on suspicion of buying drugs; they sped off, losing the cops. After ditching Sykes’ grandmother’s car they stole another vehicle that had been left running by a delivery driver in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. They later abandoned that vehicle, too. Then on the morning of the big chase, they unsuccessfully attempted a carjacking in Camden. Had they been playing a little too much Grand Theft Auto?
Their escapades appear in a grimmer light when you consider that they’d left their seven-month-old child in the care of Sykes’ grandmother before going on their spectacular last dope run.
It appears the couple’s irrational decision-making was influenced by the bleary thinking that addicts are all too familiar with, which comes at the end of a three-day run, when all sorts of unhealthy impulses seem like doing the next right thing. “I don’t know, dude,” Bills told police when asked why he did what he did. “I was cold and tired and wasn’t thinking clearly.” Perhaps the desperation of oncoming dopesickness added to it. The couple do appear to have egged each other on, with Sykes telling Bills, “Ok, do something,” when he said that if he was going to kick dope, he was going to go out big.
Members of the razor-thin slice of the addict demographic that commits serious and sometimes violent crimes often have histories of delinquency that flag their greater willingness to seriously offend. But by all accounts, people who knew both Bills and Sykes were dumbfounded by their actions, having seen no warning signs to suggest they might do something crazy, other than some online tough talk. It’s possible that even Blake Bills didn’t see any of this coming; just a few years ago, if you asked him whether it was likely that he would spend much his life in jail for attempted murder on a police officer, he probably would have thought you were joking. His Twitter feed, now filled with sad ironies, suggests that he only recently saw himself headed towards a very different destiny than the jail cell he’s currently sitting in. “Well Ive got some big news people…” he posted on November 28. “Im going to be a proud father w the woman of my dreams…time to really step my game up! #hyped”.
Jeff Deeney is a Philadelphia social worker and writer who is in recovery. His column, “Street Beat,” runs regularly in the The Fix. He is also a contributor at The Daily Beast.