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Eight days before Toby Schwartz broke into an Allen County woman’s home and raped her, he slipped away from Berne police when an officer left him unattended, according to court documents.
Officers arrested Schwartz at his father’s house in Berne on Aug. 11.
The 39-year-old was on home detention for a drunken-driving charge and a drug screen came back positive for methamphetamine, marijuana and amphetamine. When an officer stopped by to check up on him, he discovered a spent meth lab and various components for making the drug, Adams County court documents said.
Berne police officer Jason Oswalt took Schwartz back to the police department in handcuffs and then left him alone, court documents said.
The documents don’t say how long he was unattended, but police believe Schwartz slipped his cuffed hands to the front of his body and ran out the door.
Surveillance camera footage shows him running, still handcuffed, away from the police department, across Indiana 218 and between two houses.
Berne police declined repeated requests from The Journal Gazette to explain how Schwartz was able to escape or why Oswalt left him unattended.
It’s unclear what he did after his escape, though when he showed up in Allen County on Aug. 19, it was in a car that was stolen from Fort Recovery, Ohio.
Schwartz is accused of breaking into a southern Allen County home Aug. 19 and beating and raping a woman.
After the attack, Schwartz fled into Wells County.
There, he broke into two homes, swiped a set of keys, some orange juice and a teen’s Norwell Middle School sweat shirt and a minivan – his third stolen vehicle of the evening, court documents said.
Now wearing the middle-schooler’s sweat shirt, he walked into the Ossian Community Market in Ossian, put his hand in the sweat shirt’s pocket and told the clerk to hand over the cash drawer, according to court records.
Wells County Sheriff Bob Frantz, who had at this point received a raft of reports about criminal activity, spotted the stolen van fleeing the grocery store south on Indiana 1.
As he approached, Schwartz swerved and struck the sheriff’s Ford Expedition police cruiser.
The sheriff then forced the van to the west side of the road. Schwartz bailed out and ran into a nearby cornfield.
Police from several agencies surrounded the field. When police caught up with him, he went into a drug-induced seizure and spent the next several days at Bluffton Regional Medical Center, according to Wells County court filings.
All told, his pending charges in three counties are rape, criminal confinement, battery, forgery, strangulation, receiving stolen auto parts, residential entry, resisting law enforcement, possession of precursors with intent to manufacture meth, possession of a controlled substance, two counts of dealing meth, two counts of possession of meth, two counts of criminal deviate conduct, two counts of auto theft, two counts of escape, two counts of burglary and three counts of robbery.
