Driver apparently having a bad day gets busted

It was a turn of events that most people wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy.

The Farmington Police Department arrested a rural St. Francois County woman early Sunday morning after they reportedly found her with a purse full of marijuana. She was also apparently legally intoxicated because she said she had been at the bar drinking after her 10-year relationship ended hours earlier, she told the arresting officer. She was driving – on revoked driving privelages – a stolen truck which she reportedly had just taken from a business near the bar as a means of going from the bar to the county jail to bond her son out after he was arrested earlier that night. But she wouldn’t have found him there, because he across town at the police station instead, and had just left to go home.

The incident started when a Farmington police officer observed a 1988 pickup truck cross the center line of the street in the area of Columbia Street and Institution Drive at about 2:04 a.m. Sunday. The officer turned around and stopped the driver to check her condition. The officer, Sgt. Larry Lacey, was working as part of a national DWI enforcement program which the police department is participating in through September.

As routine procedure, Lacey called in a check of the dealer plate on the truck. It came back to the owner of a business in town. When he walked up to the truck he observed a female driver, and saw a purse sitting beside her in the seat. The purse had several bags of what appeared to be marijuana lying in it.

Police reports show the woman told Lacey she had just left the bar. When asked about the license plate on the truck, she told him she had just stolen the truck. She said her son had been arrested and she needed to go get him and didn’t have transportation, so she looked around until she found a vehicle with the keys inside. She would later change her mind and not want to talk anymore about the truck.

The woman, 46, was reportedly given field sobriety tests, and it was determined she was too impaired to drive. A check of her driver’s license showed she was currently under a five-year administrative revocation of her driving privelages. She was placed under arrest and taken to the police station. It was there that the rest of her story unfolded, including the reason she was drinking in the first place, she told the officer.

Preliminary testing showed the amount of marijuana field tested at 117 grams, or more than three times the legal limit to make the crime a felony. Also, the illegal substance was in four nearly equal sized bags – indicating it was packaged for resale.

She was booked on charges of felony driving while intoxicated, stealing a motor vehicle, driving while revoked, a traffic violation for weaving across the center line initially, and felony possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute.

The woman’s name was not being released as of Wednesday pending the filing of formal charges.