A 58-year-old man was driving while under the influence in Darien late Monday afternoon, Aug. 6, and the unregistered car he was driving had a license plate from another car on it, police said. And the man had a suspended driver’s license, police added.
Darien police gave this account of the incident, including accusations not proven in court:
At 4:42 p.m., a Darien police officer saw no front license plate on the Ford Explorer traveling east on Old Kings Highway South. The officer checked the rear license plate and found it belonged to a 1999 Audi A4 sedan.
The Explorer was stopped near the intersection of Tokeneke Road and Rainbow Circle, and the driver was identified as Daniel Ragin of Barnum Avenue in Bridgeport.
Ragin said he didn’t have his driver’s license with him. Police later determined that it had been suspended. Ragin also said he had recently bought the SUV and hadn’t been able to register it yet, but he said it was insured.
As the officer spoke with Ragin, the smell of an alcoholic beverage seemed to be coming from the vehicle and a brown paper bag with a bottle inside it could be seen between the driver’s seat and the center console.
Ragin gave the bottle to police. It’s a 375 ml bottle of vodka and was only one-third full.
Ragin was given field sobriety tests and didn’t complete them in a satisfactory way. He was charged with driving while under the influence, driving with a suspended driver’s license, driving an unregistered vehicle and misusing license plates.
At Police Headquarters, breath tests showed he had a blood-alcohol content of 0.2037 at 5:35 p.m. and 0.1927 at 5:55 p.m. The legal limit for an adult is 0.08.
He was later released on a promise to appear Aug. 16 in state Superior Court in Stamford.