The Roselle (Ill.) police released this picture from a drunk driving arrest this week. The driver failed to stop after hitting a tree. Instead, the car was pulled over about 11:10 p.m. traveling the wrong way with a 15-foot-tree lodged in the front grille of the Lincoln.
The officer also found that the airbags had been deployed in the car. The police arrested Maryann Christy, 54, of Schaumburg. The officer said that Christy smelled of alcohol and failed field sobriety tests.
When some people questioned the authenticity of the photos, the police released the videotape below.
I am not sure what the best defense would be here. You can admit that you were drunk or you can argue that you were sober while driving with a 15-foot tree embedded in your grille. Neither is likely to work particularly well. I am assuming that any effort to claim that the tree hit her would be equally unavailing. I suppose she could argue that she always wanted a vintage looking woodie like the 1939 Zephyr but Lincoln no longer makes them. This was the cheapest option.
It is very fitting the song played in the patrol car is Elton John’s “I’m still standing.”
This “driving” with a tree would not be a problem except we have a problem with hybrid horticulture. Ladies and gents of the jury…you can see by the pruning….here here and here…that this is not a natural tree. Such open pruning is done for a purpose. (Call arborist, horticulturist, agromist). Is it not true expert witness that this so called tree is actually grafted to root stock. Yes you say. Q: is the graft location a very weak link? Yes you say. But without leading, if this had been a real fifteen foot tree ….without a grafted stock….would the lincoln have been able to drive? So a native fifteen foot tree would have prevented my client from being cited with ” driving” with a tree. But for driving with the tree what evidence would have existed….for a dui? Isnt true. Drivers often leave the road way….hit things like trees and light poles and they are not deemed intoxicated? But here just because the tree broke off…which is the fault of the grafter….not my client. You’all wanna say she was drunk. But had she been driving a scion…and hit a real tree, she’d of been stopped dead in her tracks….and we would have a totally different case. The logic of the left and right. Jp
Squeeky – good one. You’re on a roll tonight!
People like her are like an unguided missile careening along the roads with the rest of us. It is so unbelievably selfish to go get drunk and drive home. There are taxis, and in some areas you can even get a free ride if you’re drunk. But since their decision center of your brain is the first to go numb, I guess they still think they’re fine.
One of my husband’s relatives was killed by a drunk driver 2 weeks before he graduated high school. The drunk driver left him to die, pinned underneath a truck.
@Jay S
LOL! Or like the arresting officer said to his booking sergeant, “Can you believe this beech???”
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
The driver could have said that everything was “oak”-ee-doak.
@Liberaltarian
Oh, and plus— She should have let the designated driver take the ‘elm. . . (You know, take the helm….the old nautical thingy. . .oh never mind.)
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
@SteveFroen and Jay S:
Thank you for liking the poem!!!
@Liberaltartian:
Ouch!!! LOL!!!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Car was looking a little worn. So, she decided to spruce it up.
Pretty darned good, Girl Reporter!
I don’t generally agree with Squeeky, but she hit the nail on the head with that poem ! I wonder what the officer’s first words were to the driver? “Do you notice anything stuck in the front of your car?” or “Say, have you been drinking?”
Jay S – they usually ask me “Do you know why I pulled you over?” My standard response is “Damned if I know.”
I am on my way home from the nursery and the tree wouldn’t fit in the trunk. C’mon oshifer.
What a great photograph!
After she hit the tree and it was lodged in the grill she took out a bottle of vodka and took two stiff drinks and then went out and tried to dislodge the tree. But the ounce of energy provided by the vodka was not enough and the tree would not dislodge. Then the cops got her and she was not truely drunk and not drunk when driving. That is my case ladies and gentlemen of the jury and drinks are on me after the verdict. Don’t be long. These charges are absurd.
It’s an organic hood ornament.
Darren
I’m going to leaf that comment alone. I suspect that the tree was so scared by the accident (or was it an axident) that it became petrified.
Paul
It is possible that the tree was hitch-hiking and she decided to pick it up.
@Darren
Tree-totaler??? ROTFLMAO! I wish I had thought of that!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
OMG! This had to happen this late at nite! Oh well, a cup of joe. . .and here we go!
Tree Sheets To The Wind???
A Poem by Squeeky Fromm
I thought that I would never see,
A drunken driver with a Tree!
Alas, the Tree! A bitter pill!
Uprooted by a Lincoln’s grill!
A Tree, whose buds will never bloom,
There, inside the Evidence Room!
A Tree, that birds will never sit,
Because a driver drunk as sh_t!;
Ran off the road, and ripped her out,
Then down the road she ran about!
The Rhyme is strained by fools like me,
But only drunks uproot a Tree!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Tree-totaler
It is perfectly clear that the tree jumped into the road in front of her. There was no way she could avoid it.
BTW, I am giving Lincoln points for the car. That is a tank they are building.