A man was charged after a police officer was injured.
The chain of events began months earlier, according to a report from riverbender.com, which states that a 2025 Toyota Camry had been reported stolen in St. Louis on July 18. The car resurfaced on Aug. 11, when Toyota Safety alerted St. Louis County police that the previously stolen Camry was idling on Terrace Lane in Jennings.
Officers Arrive to Find Two People Inside the Idling Camry
Two St. Louis County officers arrived in the 2600 block of Terrace Lane at about 11:43 p.m. that night and found the Camry still running, with two people seated in the front, according to the same report. The front passenger got out quickly with her arms raised, and police later identified Hardin as the driver still behind the wheel.
As officers tried to take him into custody, Hardin reversed the Camry toward one of them and stopped alongside a parked police vehicle, the outlet reports. The officer was pinned between the Camry's passenger door and a parked Lincoln Continental, injuring his right shoulder, before Hardin continued reversing and drove off. Both the Camry and the Continental were totaled in the crash, and the stolen car was found abandoned just minutes later.
A Grocery Receipt Led Investigators Back to Hardin
Investigators searching the abandoned Camry found a Schnucks receipt inside, and used information from it to pull surveillance video that helped identify Hardin as a suspect, per the riverbender.com account. The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's Office went on to charge him with first-degree assault or attempt involving serious physical injury or a special victim, armed criminal action, motor vehicle tampering and two counts of first-degree property damage.
A version of Missouri Revised Statutes § 565.050 effective July 1, 2027, classifies first-degree assault as a class B felony, with a class A felony classification when great bodily harm is inflicted or the victim is a special victim. The Missouri Revisor of Statutes provides the statute.
During an interview with St. Louis County investigators at the city jail on Oct. 28, Hardin confessed to the crimes, according to the probable cause statement cited in the report. The charges remain accusations, and Hardin is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.
Stolen Cars Remain a Persistent Problem Statewide
The case lands amid a stretch of elevated vehicle theft numbers across Missouri. The state logged more than 27,000 vehicle thefts in 2023, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which also found Missouri was one of 24 states where thefts rose from 2022 to 2023 even as the nationwide total climbed from 1,008,756 to 1,020,729 incidents. The bureau pegged the state's overall theft rate that year at 441.61 per 100,000 people.
More recently, the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance has pointed to NHTSA research indicating Missouri still ranked among the top 10 states for vehicle thefts in 2025, even as national numbers have declined. For Jennings officers responding to a single idling Camry back in August, that broader statistic became a very immediate and costly encounter.
