Stolen SUV Crashes Into Lynn Coffee Shop, Driver Arrested

LYNN (CBS) - A stolen SUV crashed into a coffee shop in Lynn early Monday morning and the driver was arrested thanks to some alert workers at a taxi company.

Officers were called to the Walnut Street Coffee Café around 2 a.m., where they found a Jeep SUV embedded in the brick wall in the front of the shop.  It had been stolen out of Beverly.

The driver, later identified as Igor Sousa Cruz, was gone. Police say he called Tom's Taxi in Lynn to get a ride home to Malden.

Dispatcher Tom Laramie thought the call was suspicious.

"Heavy breathing, like, begging me - 'Are you almost here?'," he described the caller, so Laramie called police.

The driver also thought something was up when he picked up Cruz.

"When (the taxi driver) saw the cops go by him, he had a feeling too," Laramie told WBZ-TV, "So he pulled over and the cops turned around and they came up behind him."

Cruz was arrested and charged with failure to stop for police, driving without a license and receiving stolen property.  He will be arraigned Monday afternoon.

"We're just really, really glad and we're really lucky that it happened in the middle of the night when no one was here," Alicia Churchill, the wife of the café owner, told WBZ-TV.