A 52-year-old woman was charged with driving while intoxicated after a police officer saw her drive the wrong way on the one-way part of Center Street downtown, then drive over both the fog line and the double yellow line on Mansfield Avenue, police said.
Darien police described the incident and arrest with this account (including accusations not proven in court):
At 1:56 a.m. on Sunday, July 3, an officer saw two vehicles going the wrong way on Center Street, where it’s a one-way road just behind the restaurants and bars along Tokeneke Road.
The officer followed the vehicles as they turned onto Old Kings Highway South, then Tokeneke Road, the Post Road and then north on Mansfield Avenue. The officer saw one of the vehicles, a white BMW X4 cross the “fog line” on the right side of the road, then drift across the double yellow line in the middle of the road, until it was straddling he roadway in the area of Buttonwood Lane.
The officer signaled for the car to pull over, which it did after about 20 seconds. When the officer approached the vehicle, the driver was listening to music at an extremely high volume (and was asked to turn it down). The driver, a Stamford woman, said she couldn’t find her driver’s license.
The smell of alcohol was coming from in the vehicle; the woman’s eyes were glassy, and her speech was slightly slurred.
The officer asked the woman to step out of the car for field sobriety tests, but when she did, she turned around and put her hands behind her back as if ready to be handcuffed. The officer explained that the request was for field sobriety tests. She didn’t pass them, and then she was arrested.
At one point, early on, the woman said she had been at a friend’s house in Rowayton where she’d only had two glasses of wine. That was inconsistent with driving toward Rowayton on Center Street, the officer noted in the police report. The woman later said she had two drinks — beer and a shot of “Fireball.”
At 2:41 p.m., at Darien Police Headquarters, the woman refused to take a breath test. (Refusal to take a breath test can result in stiffer penalties in DUI arrests, police have said.)
The woman was charged with driving while under the influence, failure to drive right, driving the wrong way on a one-way street and driving without a driver’s license. She was later released to a friend after posting a $250 cash bond and was scheduled to appear July 13 in state Superior Court in Stamford.