West Magee Road, May 21, 7:09 a.m.
When a woman was caught driving quite obviously drunk one weekday morning, she put a lot of time and effort into fruitlessly trying to convince law enforcement she was just a regular—that is, sober—morning commuter, according to an Oro Valley Police Department report.
Before 7 a.m. on a Monday morning, concerned citizens called the OVPD regarding an erratically driven Ford convertible on Magee Road that had swerved into a bike lane, almost striking a pedestrian. A patrolling police officer soon found the car, which had just pulled over in a bank parking lot. Another officer already on scene asked the driver to exit her convertible, which she did very slowly.
While the woman was made to stand as the other cop administered a horizontal gaze nystagmus (HGN) test, the reporting officer noticed she reeked of liquor, had bloodshot eyes, spoke abnormally slowly and with a slur, and swayed back and forth so much that she stumbled in place. Asked about any medical conditions, she said she had a "heart injury."
After the woman scored six out of six for impairment on her HGN test, she agreed to complete further field-sobriety tests and answer some questions, such as when she'd last ingested alcohol (at 11 p.m. the previous night, she said) and whether she had any problems with balance—which she said she did; when asked why she had balance problems, she answered, "Because I'm a girl."
At one point she interrupted the questioning process, alleging that she'd just been driving to work and needed to call her employer immediately. The reporting officer said the call must wait, and proceeded to ask her where she worked, which seemed to confuse her—the location she gave didn't correspond with the direction in which she'd been driving before she'd pulled into the parking lot. When she attempted to explain this, she only ended up weaving a more confusing tale.
Finally, she apparently decided to give in when both officers informed her they were about to proceed with another field-sobriety test, and she declared, "I don't want to do the tests, just take me (to jail)."
After searching her car—where officers found a water bottle full of beer and an open bottle of vodka in her purse—they brought her to a nearby police station. After drawing her blood, officers asked her how inebriated she thought she was "on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 [being] nothing to drink and [being] 10 falling-down drunk)"; she responded that "she was a 10" but "she did not feel (that) the effects of the alcohol affected her driving today."
Eventually the subject was cited and released to her father.
