SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS — Three people riding in an unmarked police car reportedly stolen by a Scotts Valley robbery suspect were arrested Friday near Japantown in San Jose, authorities said.

San Jose police Capt. Jason Dwyer said officers spotted the vehicle at Fourth and Santa Clara streets and followed it to the Pavona Apartments. Two occupants were taken into custody without incident, while the third fled into the complex and managed to elude a contingent of 50-plus officers for about 45 minutes. A Taser was used to help subdue him when he was arrested around 5 p.m. at 10th and Taylor streets, Dwyer said.

The occupants were not identified, but Santa Clara County sheriff’s detectives were “very confident” one of them was the suspect wanted in connection with a bank robbery Thursday in Scotts Valley.

The arrests occurred about one-quarter mile from the headquarters of both San Jose Police Department and the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office that was tasked with finding the bank robbery suspect.

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The police-issued silver 2009 Chevy Malibu was stolen overnight from a neighborhood in the Redwood Estates area near where the suspect last eluded authorities north of Lexington Hills, sheriff’s Sgt. Rich Glennon said.

Glennon added that the vehicle, which he said “was parked at a residence,” did not belong to the Sheriff’s office. It did not contain any weapons or police equipment, nor was it involved in the manhunt. Glennon declined to identify the police agency.

A source close to the investigation told this newspaper that the vehicle was not being used for police duty when it was stolen, and had been locked and secured. The source said it does not appear that the bank robbery suspect would have any way of knowing that the vehicle belonged to law enforcement when he took it.

It was not immediately clear how authorities determined the vehicle was stolen by the bank robber, as opposed to an unrelated thief.

On Thursday, the robbery suspect evaded scores of officers scouring mountainside neighborhoods and terrain. During his flight from law enforcement, he broke into a home in Lexington Hills on Thursday night and held up the residents at knifepoint, stealing a change of clothes and taking off in their minivan, which he ditched a short while later with deputies closing in.

The suspect eluded them once more by sprinting into the pitch-black darkness and outpacing the trained noses of the police dogs sent after him.

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Nearby Lexington Elementary School, which locked down Thursday during the initial suspect search, canceled classes Friday as a safety precaution.

The incident began in Scotts Valley around 10 a.m. Thursday when a masked man dressed all in black robbed a Bank of America branch in the 4000 block of Scotts Valley Road and fled in a white sedan, with local police giving chase as he drove onto northbound Highway 17.

He crashed the car north of Madrone Drive, and soon after a trailing Scotts Valley police officer opened fire on him. It was unclear whether the suspect was hit, but he was not described as wounded during the later home intrusion. The officer was not injured.

The suspect ran into the nearby woods as a huge contingent of officers, agents and deputies from regional law-enforcement agencies converged on the scene.

Authorities shut down Highway 17 near the site for nearly nine hours while they searched for the man, bringing the critical transportation corridor linking Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley to a standstill for most of the waking day.

Despite a methodical search of homes, yards and wooded areas — the latter by all-terrain vehicles — there was no sign of the suspect until about 10 p.m., when a woman living near Aldercroft Heights Road and Locust Drive called 911 to report that a man had broken into her home, armed himself with a knife he found inside, and made a request of the resident.

“He said, ‘I just need your vehicle,'” Glennon said.

The suspect also took a change of clothes, and fled in the resident’s van. But deputies in the area, realizing that he was heading north, set up spike strips on both sides of the fork in the road that continues Aldercroft Heights to the west or splits off onto Alma Bridge Road to the east.

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The van went west, and soon hit the spike strips and became inoperable. As deputies approached, he reportedly ran off into the dark. For safety reasons and the lack of visibility, the deputies held back to wait for backup and canine support, Glennon said.

“Because of the terrain and darkness, we were unable to pursue,” he said.

It was after that search ended around 1 a.m. that authorities believe the unmarked police vehicle was stolen.