As a 23-year-old woman sped from a police squad in St. Paul, her front-seat passenger called 911 and reported she was being taken on a high-speed chase, screaming, “My kids are in the car!”

That’s according to charges filed Tuesday against the driver, Topez Jean Spinks, of Minneapolis, who lost control of her vehicle and crashed into a stop sign and brick wall in Frogtown.

Paramedics checked the passenger’s 11-year-old son for a headache and bruised knee. The passenger’s two other children in the car at the time, a 4-year-old and a 14-year-old, were uninjured, according to a criminal complaint charging Spinks with child endangerment and fleeing a peace officer.

Police on patrol about 12:07 a.m. Monday saw a vehicle with a damaged taillight fail to completely stop at a stop sign at Cook and Western avenues, according to the complaint.

The squad followed the vehicle, which sped up, ran through a stop sign and nearly struck another vehicle, police said.

The squad’s emergency lights came on, but the driver sped up even more, “running each stop sign and stop light it encountered” and nearly striking a parked car before it crashed at Mackubin Street and Van Buren Avenue, about a mile from where police first noticed it, the complaint said.

Then Spinks got out of the car and started walking away, the complaint said. Officers ordered to her the ground, and she complied and was arrested.

Spinks had a bloody nose and the 29-year-old passenger, the mother of the children in the back seat, complained of a headache, the complaint said. The passenger told police she had called 911 during the incident “so police would be aware her children were in the car during the chase,” the complaint said.

Spinks told police “she fled because she thought she had warrants and was concerned for her passengers,” the complaint continued.

Later, she “claimed she did not know it was a police car behind her or she would have stopped,” the complaint said.