Police Make Mirror-Image Drunk Driving Stops

Wauwatosa police arrested two men for drunken driving Saturday, one early in the morning and one late the next night, each of whom had been to Brewers games and then to Blue Mound sports bars, had three friends in the car and was speeding on the same stretch of road and gave exactly the same excuse for driving too fast.

The only difference was in the way that they failed to embrace designated driver advice – one had a sober passenger who could have been driving, while the other group was entirely intoxicated.

The D-driver belongs in the front left seat

At 11:45 p.m. Saturday, a 32-year-old Menomonee Falls man was arrested for drunken driving, first offense, after a traffic stop for speeding.

A patrol officer monitoring speed on Blue Mound Road at Honey Creek Parkway  clocked the driver at 46 mph in the 30 mph zone and pulled him over.

The driver said he thought he was going only about 35 and thought it was a 35 zone.

The man, who had three passengers with him, smelled of alcohol and admitted drinking quite a bit at a Brewers tailgate, during the game and afterward at Rounding Third, 6317 Blue Mound Rd., Milwaukee.

He performed poorly on field sobriety tests and blew a .133 blood alcohol concentration on a preliminary breath test and later, a .12 BAC on an evidentiary test.

One of the man’s passengers, who had been sitting in the back seat, said he felt sober enough to drive the others home and took a voluntary breath test that registered a .03 BAC. He was allowed to drive.

Why he wasn’t driving in the first place, neither he nor the suspect said.

Too bad police had to think of the taxi plan

At 1:18 a.m. Saturday, a 35-year-old Racine man was arrested for drunken driving, first offense, after a stop for speeding on Blue Mound Road.

An officer standing a watch for the Southeast Wisconsin Multi-Jurisdictional OWI Task Force was monitoring the road in the 8200 block when he clocked that driver, who also had three passengers, doing 45 in the same 30-mph zone.

He, too, said he thought he was going only about 35, and also thought that was the speed limit.

He said his group had gone to the Brewers game and then to Kelly’s Bleachers, 5218 Blue Mound Rd. in Milwaukee.

How many drinks? “A couple,” he said. How many is a couple? “Two, three, four….”

At that point, one of the man’s passengers, from Wauwatosa, interrupted the officer to ask why his taxes had gone up by $200. Another Tosan chimed in and asked that they all be cut a break because of the high taxes they pay in our city.

That passenger then recorded on his cell phone camera his friend’s attempt to perform field sobriety tests, which he failed. The driver blew a .153 BAC on a breath test and was arrested.

He told officers that if any of his passengers was fit to drive, he or she could take the car and deliver the others home. All three volunteered that they believed they could drive, but when they took breath tests registering .145, .149 and .227, they were given the number of a cab company.