DUI suspect claims he’s riding around with dog, but all GA cop sees in car is beer
Shortly before midnight on Sept. 13, a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy on patrol near Johnstonville Road off Interstate 75 spotted a Toyota FJ Cruiser weaving along Rocky Creek Road. The deputy pulled the SUV over. The driver appeared to be either lost, drunk or both.
The driver, a 48-year-old man from Braselton, was said to have had glassy, bloodshot eyes. He told the deputy that he was returning home from Miami, where he had driven, as the man put it, to “pick up a dog.” The deputy, curious, looked inside the Toyota and saw no dog. “However,” the deputy’s write-up noted, “I did see a dog bed in the back seat that had an opened case of Miller Lite beer in it.”
The deputy again asked about the dog. “He advised (that) where he went to pick the dog up did not have (the dog),” the report said. “I then asked (the man) how much alcohol he had consumed before driving.” None, the man said.
Before allegedly failing a series of sobriety tests, he admitted having one drink before leaving south Florida. He was arrested for DUI. Upon searching the SUV, the deputy’s reported noted there was “a half-drank Miller Lite in the passenger floorboard of the front seat. The Miller Lite was still cold. … I also observed multiple empty open containers in the back seat including several different types of alcohol.” But no dog.
Dispatches: A 49-year-old man suspected of drunken driving was found passed out at the wheel of a Honda Accord the night of Sept. 8. The car was in the northbound lane of U.S. 41 west of Forsyth. The car’s stereo was cranked “all the way up” and music was blasting, a sheriff’s deputy’s report said. The driver, meanwhile, was out cold. Until, that is, the cop banged on the car’s windows and shouted to rouse him. The droopy-eyed and apparently inebriated driver “could barely hold his head up,” the deputy’s report went on. “At one point the driver looked at me and said something that I could not hear for the radio, but reading his lips (it) appeared to be ‘[Expletive] you.’” The man was jailed on DUI and other charges. . . . A fellow who had been living at the Shady Oaks Mobile Home Park along Ga. Highway 42 a few miles south of Forsyth told the authorities that he and the girlfriend he had been staying with were arguing the night of Sept. 16. He said he packed his things, put them in his car and left, but that when he returned the next day to retrieve more belongings, the items were gone. The man informed a sheriff’s deputy that he believed his belongings were gone because, as the deputy’s write-up said, the man had left with the couple’s puppy. The items missing: a $550 9 mm pistol and an $800 grill of “gold teeth.”