Officer Lynn Flanders, our Florida friend, had a strange experience with a drunk driver one evening.
“I was pulling over a speeder one night when he put the car in park and jumped into the backseat,” she said. “I didn’t know if he was going for a weapon or not, so I called for backup.
“In the minute or two that I waited for backup, the couple in the car seemed to be having a fight. They were arguing so loudly I could hear them from my squad car.”
When Flanders’s backup arrived after a few minutes, she cautiously approached the car she had stopped and peered in the window. A woman sat in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and a furious look on her face.
Flanders asked the woman what she was doing.
“I don’t know, Officer,” she responded. “Why don’t you ask the rocket scientist in the back?”
She gestured toward the disheveled-looking man in the backseat, who looked back with bloodshot eyes.
“Hey, I don’t know what’s going on,” he said with slightly slurred speech and an air of aggrieved innocence. “I’ve been asleep back here the whole time. Just woke up a minute ago.”
“He didn’t say that the woman had been driving,” Flanders recalls. “If he had, I believe she would have been much harder on him than the courts. So he just went with the ghost-driver theory.
“We ran a check and found out he had several warrants on him. He was arrested for D.U.I.”
And poof! Suddenly, he disappeared into the criminal justice system.