‘You better not be drunk.’ Georgia cop overhears DUI suspect’s roadside call from mom
A Chevrolet Envoy pulling a U-Haul trailer crashed into a guardrail along Interstate 75 in southern Monroe County on Feb. 19. A sheriff’s deputy spoke to the driver involved, who said one of his tires blew out. But he insisted, contrary to what the deputy saw, that he hadn’t hit any guardrail.
The driver, a 50-year-old man from Clermont, Florida, west of Orlando, looked glazed-over, sleepy-eyed and off balance and, according to the deputy’s report, the man’s speech was slurred. The man claimed to be “working as a federal agent for the government through AT&T” and said he had a “federal service dog” named Zeus in his SUV.
“He stated that Zeus did not like others and would bite,” the deputy’s report further noted. After flunking some roadside sobriety exercises, the man was given a breath test, which returned a reading of .297, more than three times the legal limit to drive in Georgia.
At one point during his encounter with the deputy, the man said he’d had some alcohol to drink four or five hours earlier. The deputy also overheard the man talking on the telephone with his mother. At the end of the man’s conversation with his mom, the deputy noted, the mother said to the man, “You better not be drunk.”
As it turned out, he allegedly was. He was jailed on a DUI charge. There was no further mention of whether the man was a federal agent — though it appeared not — or if there was really a dog traveling with him.
Dispatches: A former smalltime college football player from Florida was charged with marijuana possession with intent to distribute after he was pulled over on I-75 north of Forsyth. The man, 25, from Lakeland, was stopped for driving too close to another car the afternoon of Feb. 10. The man pulled into a highway weigh station and stopped, telling a sheriff’s deputy that he was, as a report put it, “looking for somewhere to get some gas.” The young man ended up getting a lift to jail after the deputy found a purple gallon bag of marijuana inside the man’s Nissan Altima with the word “Cookies” on it. The deputy found more weed in a pickle jar. . . . A 26-year-old Gwinnett County woman was stopped for reportedly weaving down I-75 near Forsyth on New Year’s Eve. The woman, whose blood-alcohol level was later tested at more than twice the legal limit to drive, said she was heading home from a cocktail bar at Ponce City Market on the east side of Atlanta. Asked where she thought she was, the woman said, “Somewhere in Atlanta.” She was not, but rather 62 miles to the south, and soon on her way to the Monroe jail charged with DUI.