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In This Issue...
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Driving Impaired: The Costs & Consequences
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DUI Hunting
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The Mid-County Post > Driving Impaired: The Costs & Consequences
DUI Hunting
Keeping Drunks Off the Road Over the Holidays and Year Round
By Mary Bryant
It's nearing midnight on a Friday night, and Capitola Police Officer Dana Van Den Heuvel is in her police cruiser out of sight of an intersection. She can see cars stopping at the stop sign. Or, in the case of a new and shiny black Land Rover, only slowing or "rolling" through the intersection.
"Watch the wheels," she advises.
Van Den Heuvel is right. By watching the tires of a car coming to a rolling stop at the intersection, it's easy to determine if the driver has properly stopped his or her vehicle. If a driver rolls a stop, then officers can pull over the car.
Besides making certain motorists pay attention to the rules of the road, officers are also hunting for people driving under the influence, better known as DUIs or deuces.
The Land Rover doesn't stop at first, instead turning onto a side street. This is a bit suspicious. Van Den Heuvel steps up to the driver's window, shining a light in his eyes.
"The eyes don't lie," is another thing you need to know about DUI hunting, Van Den Heuvel says.
The eyes of an impaired driver can't smoothly follow the officer's hand back and forth. Any officer trained in administering field sobriety tests or FSTs looks first to the eyes.
Van Den Heuvel said that it's impossible for a drinker to conceal the changes in eye movement.
This 50-something man has failed his first test in the car, unable to cleanly follow the officer's hand movement left to right and back.
Now, he's asked to step out of the car. About this time, Capitola Sergeant Darryl Harrison has pulled up. He says that officers never know how a suspect is going to react. Some run, some fight, some yell, some pee and many just start to cry. This guy is just answering the officer's questions for the moment.
"Do you have any injuries that might prevent you from standing on one leg?" the officer asks.
The driver says "No," but then can't complete the test. Is he drunk? We know he's been drinking, but how much?
Unable to complete the field test – now the suspect is saying he had knee surgery that prevents him from standing on one leg – the man is provided a breathalyzer test.
"Just blow into the breathalyzer." He fails on the first go. The second time, he completes the test.
His breath shows an estimated blood alcohol content of .079. The legal limit is .08 for Vehicle Code Section 23152(b), "Driving Under Influence of Alcohol or Drugs." He could be cited for a 23152 (a) that ranges from .02 to .08.
He isn't. Mostly, Officer Van Den Heuvel says, because he cooperated and lives a half block down the street. She follows him home. Then turns around to hunt again.
Finding the Deuces
The most common violations of a series of driving-under-the-influence laws are 23152 (a) and (b). Not including stops made by area CHP officers, in 2008 some 633 152-citations were issued throughout the county, most resulting in arrests. Just as important a statistic, there were 15 accidents in the county (again not including CHP) involving a DUI that resulted in injury last year.
Just recently, one North County and one South County fatal accident were each caused by drunk drivers. In Watsonville, a drunk male — with DUI over 10 years ago – rolled his truck. He died at the scene, along with one passenger. Another passenger succumbed to his injuries at a trauma center. On Highway 1 along the North Coast, a female driver with multiple past DUI convictions killed two men, a passenger and a motorcycle driver. Her blood alcohol was reported to be three times the legal limit.
Both recent fatal crashes happened in the daytime. However, the majority of arrests are after dark. Capitola Police, along with other municipal law agencies, have help setting up DUI check points and deploying special patrols.
This November, the department announced a nearly $500,000 grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety to support special DUI operations countywide.
More Than Just Drunks
On one Saturday night, Capitola Officer Marquis Booth is working on the grant and on the street looking for impaired drivers. Being impaired means just that. You can be on prescription pills and be impaired. Or having smoked marijuana, snorted methamphetamine or a combination of anything with alcohol.
During the day, Booth is assigned to investigations. He returns to the street to keep his patrol skills current. And to catch drunken drivers.
Booth – one of the department's younger officers at 24 years of age – lost his best friend in high school to drinking and driving. The friend was out partying with a bunch of friends. No one knows exactly what happened – probably the friend dozed off. That was Christmas Eve.
His friend was driving an older Honda Accord. His passenger in the front seat lived, but with major injuries to her legs.
Booth believes that after 11 p.m. in Capitola there must be someone driving drunk. He assumes this, and goes looking to find the impaired motorist. As much as he wants to protect the public, he says he remembers his friend and he wants to also arrest a drunk driver before he or she causes an accident and is hurt.
He remembers one man he arrested three times.
"People don't think about [drinking and driving]," Booth reasons.
Considering how much publicity DUI prevention has received, others in law enforcement have the exact opposite reaction.
CHP officer Sarah Jackson said she's always on patrol for drunken drivers.
"We are patrolling for impaired drivers 24 hours a day," she added. "We are setting out to find that driver [who is impaired] because this is the way we save lives."
She said that anyone found under the influence who is responsible for a fatal accident will be charged with a felony. Any driver under the influence and causing a fatal accident will be charged of second degree murder.
"Everybody in our society has reasonably heard the message that DUI [motorists can take] lives or could potentially hurt somebody," she said.
Drunks Are Mostly
Weird and Sad
How do drunks behave when caught driving? Pretty much the way they behave when drinking and doing anything else: weird and sad.
Officer Van Den Heuvel has also found a surprising number of repeat offenders. She recalls one woman driving a Mercedes who was weaving curb-to-curb on Park Avenue. She followed her all the way to Seacliff before she could get the driver to stop.
The middle-aged woman couldn't even complete the breathalyzer test, much less walk a straight line or balance on one leg.
"She could not even manipulate her wallet to retrieve its contents," Van Den Heuvel added.
She transported the woman to jail. It turned out that the woman had just come from jail, with enough time in between being released that night at 8:30 p.m. to get drunk again and be rebooked by 11:30 p.m.
And catching the same drunk more than once isn't that unusual.
"This guy was a waiter who worked in Los Altos," she said.
The man lived in Capitola. Van Den Heuvel met him for the first time driving an older VW sedan. The car's license plate light was out as the man was driving through Capitola at 3:30 a.m. Van Den Heuvel stopped his car.
The man, who was in his 40s, had a license suspended for DUI, had a warrant for his arrest in a previous DUI incident and was DUI again. He blew a .18, and went to jail that early morning.
Van Den Heuvel learned that the suspect had also been investigated for a car crash.
"I knew he was going to drive again," she said. "Driving by his house I saw he had gotten another car."
A few weeks later, while sitting at an intersection completing a report, she saw the same man try to negotiate an illegal turn.
"He remembered me," she said, adding that he tried to run.
This arrest she learned the guy had another accident to his credit, a DUI rollover. Considering this was the man's fifth arrest, the judge set bail at $100,000. On the fourth DUI, the charges move from misdemeanor to felony. Van Den Heuvel said she was pleased the guy was in jail for the rest of the year, eventually being sentenced to two years in state prison.
"I didn't want him to kill anybody over the holiday," she said.
Those Embarrassing Moments...
Officer Booth tells a story about arresting a young woman in her 20s. He found her driving drunk on Park Avenue. He observed the woman run into a curb and then run a stop.
From the first moment she spoke to him, she was uncooperative. She scored more than twice the legal limit on the breathalyzer.
Booth was on the way to Dominican Hospital so the woman could take a blood alcohol test when the woman, in the back seat of the car, stripped her pants. She wasn't wearing underwear.
At the hospital, she had to wait for the hospital technician. Booth was working on a report.
The next thing he noticed was she had managed to pull a trash can over to her chair and was peeing into the can.
Officer Van Den Heuvel remembered a call that she responded to. The officer had already arrested the driver. Van Den Heuvel walked up to the car, and suddenly smelled what she thought was cat poop on her boot.
It turned out that that her boots were clean. The woman had unexpectedly soiled her pants.
Officers say that losing bladder and bowel control is not uncommon for drunks.
Apparently, judging distances also isn't something that drunks do too well either.
Capitola Officer Barry Duggan remembers one early morning patrol when the streets were empty, the stores closed and no one around.
He stopped his car at the intersection for a red light. No one to the right. No one to the left. No one in front. No one to the rear, except the guy behind him who was too drunk to stop.
The man rear-ended the very surprised officer, was arrested and taken to jail.
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