Police Reports: Celebrating Victory, Obama Voter Gets 1st OWI Ticket

Two Milwaukee men were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of driving while drunk on the streets of Wauwatosa, one of whom said he had been toasting President Obama's re-election at a party with friends.

At 12:58 a.m. Wednesday – about three hours after media began declaring an Obama victory – a 26-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested after he failed to stop for a flashing red light on Wauwatosa Avenue at Harmonee Avenue in the Village.

A patrol officer who saw the infraction pulled up behind the driver as he stopped at the drive-up ATM at Chase Bank, 7430 W. State St.

A passenger in the car was holding a 16-ounce beer can when the officer walked up to the car, and the driver launched into a speech about President Obama having won re-election.

Because the man stopped beside the ATM, he could not get out of his car, so the officer asked him to pull forward about 10 feet. When he did so, he ran over a curb, “furthering my belief that he had been drinking,” the officer dryly noted in his report.

The suspect admitted to having had a few drinks before driving while he was at an Election Night party with friends, ending with a few celebratory rounds after the race was called in favor of the president.

The driver was barely able to complete the steps of sobriety tests and refused a breath test, so a mandatory blood sample was taken. It was his first OWI offense.

A hard one for an officer to miss

The next night, another driver made the mistake of running a red light while there was a marked Wauwatosa patrol car right behind him.

At 11:48 p.m. Wednesday, the 22-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving, second offense.

The officer was driving immediately behind the man when he turned through a red signal at Milwaukee Avenue onto Wauwatosa Avenue without stopping and headed north.

The driver weaved erratically, nearly striking the curb several times, and when he veered into the bicycle lane north of North Avenue, the officer hit the lights and pulled him over.

The driver, who smelled strongly of alcohol, in a slow, slurred manner admitted having had “a few drinks at a friend’s house.”

He performed poorly on standard field sobriety tests and registered a .15 blood alcohol concentration on a breath test. He had previously been convicted of operating while intoxicated in April 2009.

In other recent incidents:

Tuesday

A resident of the 4400 block of North 107th Street reported that overnight someone had stolen her 2007 Toyota Camry out of her driveway. She told police the car had been locked. No evidence of how the car was entered, such as broken glass, was found, and the car’s alarm had not sounded.

Monday

A Wauwatosa woman reported that she had been defrauded of $1,700 in what she now realized was a phony job offer she responded to on Craigslist. She had received a check for $1,980 from “Sam Alex” via an email account but was to deposit it only on the condition that she, in turn, send a check for $1,700 to “First Orphanage, in care of Omobolaji Adams, Rue 99 Davie, Porto Novo, Benin 00229” – which she did. The victim told police she was vaguely aware that Benin might be a nation in Africa and did not know what made her think this request was somehow associated with a job offer. The check sent to her proved to be fraudulent, of course, and her bank withdrew the $1,980 deposit from her account.