Anchorage Daily News

This is a story with many morals:

Don't race your car on Northern Lights Boulevard.

If you race anyway and wind up crashing into the Fred Meyer parking lot, don't flee from the scene.

If you flee anyway, don't seek a hiding place inside a busy store.

If you hide inside a busy store anyway, don't hide in a bathroom that's only got one way in, meaning there's only one way out.

Two men and a woman were charged with a variety of crimes, at least one of them a felony, after making a series of dubious choices while out on the town Saturday night.

Two of them were hospitalized with injuries, including the driver, who broke a couple of bones in her arm, police said.

The worst of the carnage, however, was suffered by some 20 shopping carts that were wiped out by a Ford Explorer driven by Tiana Vonmergl-Grote, 21.

Vonmergl-Grote was charged with reckless driving and felony assault for causing injury to at least one of her passengers. She's also in trouble for mangling the shopping carts, valued between $150 and $300 apiece, police said.

Christopher Shively, 20, was charged with obstruction, disorderly conduct and minor consuming alcohol. The other passenger, whose name wasn't available, was charged with minor consuming alcohol.

"The real moral is don't flee. If they had just sat there and been cooperative, this potentially could have had a different result," Sgt. Pablo Paiz of the Anchorage Police Department said.

"There are two ways to go: the easy way and the hard way, and they chose the hard way.

"We can go either way."

Witnesses told police that Vonmergl-Grote was racing another car while traveling west on Northern Lights.

"She was changing lanes rapidly, lost control, jumped the curb, entered the north side of the parking lot and struck a row of shopping carts," Paiz said. "That caused the car to flip. It landed on its roof and slid to a stop."

The three crawled out of the Explorer and ran, Paiz said.

"We started looking for them, the first logical place being the store. We found all three of them hiding in a bathroom stall," he said.

But the tale doesn't end there. Shively put on a show inside the store, Paiz said, leading to the disorderly conduct charge.

"He was in there screaming like an idiot in front of families and children, cursing and acting obnoxious," Paiz said.

An obstruction charge was added to Shively's list of offenses because he told cops he was the driver, not Vonmergl-Grote, Paiz said.

"We had good witnesses who observed the female was driving," he said.

No one other than the car's occupants was injured, Paiz said, but the Explorer appeared to be a total loss.

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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