Man Carjacks Yellow Taxi in Manhattan Leonia Police Department The police chased a taxi on Monday to Leonia, N.J., where it became stuck on a sidewalk. He came from Texas believing he was a spy, his brother said, and on Monday, he commandeered a New York City cab. For about an hour, the man, Brian Charles Ambrose, of Ingleside, Tex., led the police on a morning chase from the busy intersection of 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan to a quiet corner in the small New Jersey town of Leonia. He ended up in handcuffs, and the cab wound up wedged between a traffic pole and the side of a market. The episode started around 7:20 a.m., just as the morning commute was beginning. Mr. Ambrose, 40, approached the cab, which was carrying a female passenger, and demanded to be taken to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the authorities said. When the driver refused, Mr. Ambrose began beating him and pulled him from the car, said Lt. Thomas Rowe, the commander of the Leonia Police Department. The passenger fled the cab during the altercation, Lieutenant Rowe said. After punching the driver, who suffered injuries to the face and was treated at Bellevue Hospital Center, Mr. Ambrose got into the driver's seat of the cab and drove north on Eighth Avenue, the police in New York said. New York police officers tracked the yellow cab to the West Side Highway before losing it across the George Washington Bridge. Lieutenant Rowe said that the cab had been tracked using its onboard GPS device and that local police officers first spotted it on Broad Avenue in Leonia, about 3 miles from the bridge and 11 miles from where the cab was seized. As they began a pursuit, the cab jumped the curb and continued driving on the sidewalk toward an intersection by an elementary school. "It's our busiest school crossing," Lieutenant Rowe said. Ten minutes later, it would have been a horrible scene. Just before the intersection, the cab became stuck, Lieutenant Rowe said. There, police officers tackled Mr. Ambrose as he tried to flee. The Leonia police said Mr. Ambrose had been charged with several offenses including criminal possession of stolen property and assaulting a police officer. He faces additional charges in New York City, the police said. Mr. Ambrose's brother, Randy Ambrose, said the family had long struggled to get help for Mr. Ambrose, who has had numerous encounters with the law in Texas and during his occasional, spontaneous trips out of the state. "That was the first time he's been in New York," he said. Mr. Ambrose told his brother that he had gone to meet someone from Interpol, one of a number of fantastical stories that he had heard over the years. "He goes off and says stuff off the wall: that he's a D.E.A. agent, that the K.G.B. is after him," he said in a telephone interview. He was in a mental hospital in Nebraska for a while. They helped him out real well there. But once he got back to Texas, he wouldn't take his medicine and he'd just get lost in the system. "We're just sorry this happened," Randy Ambrose added, "and happy nobody got seriously hurt."