The last thing the owner expected to do that day was cling to the side of his own truck and yell at a stranger. The last thing Harford County deputies expected was to spend an afternoon trying to stop a surplus Army cargo vehicle with tools meant for ordinary traffic.

Michael Stevens left jail on May 26, 2023, after posting bail on a theft charge. He was 38. Hours later he was in the driver’s seat of a 1986 five-ton military truck that had been parked in a driveway. The owner’s story, preserved in the investigative narration that accompanies released bodycam video, is specific. He came outside, heard the engine, confirmed that no family member was in the cab, and ran. Traffic in the street bought him a few seconds. He jumped on the running board. He asked who the man was. The truck moved, swerved, and came head-on as he got off.

Deputies reconstructed the path in real time. Bel Air came up as a possible early collision point. Green Army truck sightings guided the response. The vehicle’s nature shaped every decision that followed. No keys. Switch operation. Doors that do not lock like a civilian truck. A weight class that makes a patrol car look small. A design brief written for mud and load, not for yielding to spike strips on I-95.

The chase audio is almost a second script. Watch your back, debris is coming out. Get a unit on 95 past 152. Keep someone on 152. Slow traffic if you can. Do not let this thing hit anybody else. Coming up on the sticks. He took the shoulder. Maybe he hit them. Front left, inner right, still rolling. He lives in Abingdon but he is not simply going home. Be ready to jump. Get out of the road. Shut 95 if you have to. Two troopers ahead in the express lanes with more sticks. Then: do not deploy more. Then: a rifle out the window. Ease off. Let the aircraft work.

In the neighborhood the truck finally lost the advantage of mass and speed. A slow left turn let deputies close. Stevens ran. The foot pursuit was brief. Officers later walked the ground in conversation: he jumped, they got him at the alley before I-95, no rifle in the truck, he had been reaching under his shirt in a way that made at least one deputy grab a hand.

The legal file filled in what the cameras could not. First-degree assault. Felony theft. Fleeing and eluding. The truck went back to its owner. No bystander injuries were reported in the public summary. A pinned update on the widely circulated video stated that court records showed a ten-year prison sentence.

What viewers remember, beyond the green bulk on the highway, is the collision of tones. Serious radio. A machine that refused to act like a stolen Camry. A reported gun that never appeared in evidence. And, after the suspect was on the ground, a deputy talking to a K-9 as if the chase had been a training exercise. The facts do not need embellishment. A man left a detention center, stole a keyless military truck, survived spikes and an interstate, and was stopped only when the road narrowed and he chose to run. Maryland has many chase videos. Few of them begin with a running board and end with a ten-year term for taking a piece of Army surplus into civilian traffic.