Three months after he tried to run over undercover narcotics investigators with a rental car, those same county detectives walked right into William Rojas on Saturday.
Mr. Rojas, 30, unknown address, had just returned to Scranton after months spent on the run when the same two Lackawanna County narcotics detectives who filed a warrant for his arrest after the Aug. 10 incident at Albright Avenue and Grove Street noticed him driving a Jeep on Swetland Street, detectives said.
Mr. Rojas had been wanted on a litany of felony charges since he tried to run down city and county detectives with a rental car that one city cop fired a bullet at to protect himself on Aug. 10.
When the county detectives noticed him by chance while conducting surveillance in an unrelated investigation, they rounded up their team and staked out Mr. Rojas' parked Jeep in the 1400 block of Swetland Street.
At about 5:45 p.m. they saw him walking toward the vehicle, and Mr. Rojas again took off running.
He had outrun the investigators for a few blocks when he barreled through a fence gate in the backyard of 355 N. Lincoln Ave.
As a detective later described it, Mr. Rojas apparently did not realize in the near darkness of early evening that the surface he was about to set foot on in that backyard was actually the cover of an in-ground pool.
After a step or two, he collapsed into the water and then followed the detectives' orders to swim over to the side and was arrested.
A search of Mr. Rojas - who identified himself as Marcus Guerrero - found three cellphones and $851.
Though he pleaded with investigators to use him as an informant to buy "kilos" from the "big fish," even going so far as to drop the names of known drug traffickers in the area, he was denied and taken in on the warrant.
The charges against him from the earlier investigation stemmed from a brief undercover drug investigation that began on Aug. 7, when investigators with the Lackawanna County District Attorney's Office made a controlled purchase of heroin from Mr. Rojas, an associate of Danny Horton, 31, of Scranton, detectives said.
Mr. Horton was a passenger in the vehicle Mr. Rojas used to try and run over investigators after they attempted to take the two men into custody on drug charges.
Mr. Rojas successfully eluded officers that day while Mr. Horton was arrested a short distance from where their car crashed after they fled down Albright Avenue.
After the incident, investigators looked up the rental agreement for the vehicle Mr. Rojas was driving and found the name of a woman he was dating at the time.
Though she did not know many particulars about Mr. Rojas, whom she believed was named Marcus Guerrero, the woman did mention that he had a child with a stripper named Fawn.
Familiar with the woman from previous investigations, detectives looked up Fawn Morgan, 31, at the Lackawanna County Domestic Relations office and found that Mr. Rojas fathered one of her children. One look at Mr. Rojas' picture in a law enforcement database and the investigators identified the man that, until that point, they knew only by his street name, Carmello, detectives said.
Efforts to take him into custody proved unsuccessful until Saturday, when he was also found to have 24 bags of heroin on him.
He was arraigned on 31 counts, four of which were felony aggravated assault. He was sent to Lackawanna County Prison in lieu of $200,000 bail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Nov. 29.
Contact the writer: domalley@timesshamrock.com, Follow @domalleyTT on Twitter