A scratched and bleeding Wauwatosa police officer kept up a dogged foot chase after a young fugitive for 17 minutes in the dark, over fences, in and out of snowbanks, through briars and brambles, before the fleeing suspect finally collapsed.

At 2:14 a.m. Saturday, the 23-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested on a variety of charges after he fled from the patrol officer, who had stopped him for a field interview.

The officer saw him walking with a young woman down the middle of the 2500 block of North 60^th Street. The officer immediately recognized the 19-year-old woman from “many prior contacts” but had never seen the man.

When he checked his identification, he found the man was wanted on a felony probation violation warrant for burglary. When he told the man to put his hands behind his back, the fugitive took off running.

The officer gave chase and followed the man through yards and over fences, once losing sight of him but tracking him through fresh snow. He spotted him again and renewed the chase, cutting his hand on a strand of barbed wire atop a fence and his face in a thicket of thorny bushes.

The suspect ran a time of 17 minutes, block after block, through a residential obstacle course, repeatedly changing direction – north, then west, back east – and ended up almost back at the starting line, in the 2600 block of North 59^th Street, where he ran out of breath, fell after mounting one last fence, and gave up.

Besides the fugitive felon warrant, he was arrested for resisting an officer and for the 11.2 grams of marijuana, in 13 individually wrapped smaller bags, he had in his pocket.