DUI suspect crashes, falls asleep, tells cop he’s headed to ... the month of August
Police officers hear their share of incoherent chatter from drunken-driving suspects. Try as they might to make conversation and mask their intoxication, impaired drivers sometimes can’t help themselves. They invariably say the stupidest things.
Such was the case early one morning on Ga. 87 in eastern Monroe County. A sheriff’s deputy was sent to check on a Saturn SUV that had crashed into a ditch about 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 6. The deputy walked up, looked inside and saw a man asleep in the back seat. The deputy, according to an incident report, knocked on the window several times until the guy inside, a 27-year-old from Juliette, woke up.
“The subject appeared to be very confused and could not figure out how to unlock and open the door,” the report noted. “Once I showed him how to unlock the door, he did.”
The man’s eyes were said to be bloodshot and watery and he also smelled of alcohol. He said he had “pulled over.” The deputy informed him that, no, he had wrecked. The man gave the deputy his name and when asked his date of birth, the man began spelling his name. Asked where he was traveling from, the man gave his birth date. He said he had earlier in the night downed three beers.
“420 SweetWaters,” he added. When asked where he was headed, he said, “August, I mean, I really don’t have a good date.” Upon flunking some sobriety tests, including a breath test that registered .183, more than twice the legal limit, he was jailed for DUI.
Dispatches: A 58-year-old Florida woman who was pulled over for doing 90 mph last summer on Interstate 75 near Forsyth. She was asked by a sheriff’s deputy if she had any medical problems. “Well, yeah,” she said as she began laughing. Her speech was slurred, her eyes red and puffy. She said she was on Xanax and then pulled out a medical-marijuana card. After stepping out of her car, she “became emotional and often rambled incoherently,” the deputy’s write-up said. In the car, the deputy found bottles of pills and three small, cold bottles of Sutter Home wine — two of which had been opened, one of them empty. The deputy also found THC and a vape pen. The woman soon stopped crying and began laughing. “She advised that she had used the vape to calm her nerves and (drank) the wine earlier,” the report said. She was arrested on DUI and other charges. . . . Another DUI case, this one on Feb. 7, involved a tractor-trailer rig whose owners had informed the authorities that its driver may be impaired, possibly on drugs. The northbound truck was 200 miles off its route and the driver, from Illinois, had “been talking erratic all morning,” a report said. When the truck was pulled over south of Forsyth on I-75, the driver was told that he had been stopped because he was failing to stay in his lane. The driver, 55, who was said to be “sweating and twitching,” explained that he had been “distracted by the people on top of his truck.” Asked what he meant, the driver pointed to the roof of his cab, where, of course, there were no people. He was arrested on charges that included drunken driving.