This story happened back in the early 70’s. My partner, Bob Kersten, and I spotted a car driving the wrong way down a one way street. We finally were able to get it pulled over at the edge of downtown. The driver was totally plastered, a friendly drunk who was relieved that he had been pulled over to end his nightmare drive.
It seems he had left the Teamster’s Local out on Katy Freeway and driven the wrong way on the freeway until he got downtown and then continued the wrong way, exiting into downtown via an “on ramp”, then through town the wrong way dodging cars the whole way. There’s a joke about a wife who calls her husband on the cell phone after hearing about a car going the wrong way down the freeway on the news. “One”, he says into the phone, “there’s hundreds of them”.
Bob and I looked the fellow over and came to the same conclusion; he wasn’t just big, he’s huge. A glance at his wrists let us know that they were too large to even think about putting the cuffs on. We kept talking in low hushed tones so as not to get him excited. The fellow was still grateful to us for having stopped the nightmare and sat down in the front seat of the patrol car for us.
This was one of the older units that had no cage; one of us was going to have to drive the suspect's car to the impound while the other would get to carefully continue the conversation back to Central. At the time there was no policy in place to have suspect’s cars towed; which meant one of us would have to be “one on one” with the suspect while the suspect’s car was driven back to the station. Had we really been thinking, we would have "found" something wrong with the car, called for a wrecker, along with the paddy wagon and a couple of back up units. We were just content with keeping the situation calm and peaceful and let the hand play out. It’s been so long ago that I can’t remember which of us did what; but it got done without incident, at least up until the point where the fog lifted from his alcohol drenched brain and he figured out that we had him at the police station to arrest him.
Back then DWI suspects had to be taken to the second floor Accident Division offices to start the booking procedure; the breathalyzer testing equipment was located there, a couple of desks to fill out forms were directly adjacent to the general purpose roll call assembly area and then some supervisor’s offices butted up to that area. We got our suspect upstairs and into the fluorescent lights of the roll call room. I think it was the lighting that set him off; an unfriendly wash of white lights, in any case he went ballistic on us.
Nobody had to yell, “Hey Rube!” because metal folding chairs were crashing into walls, large desks being overturned and general chaos in motion as officers from various offices came to help. I do remember grabbing a folding chair to use like a garbage can lid except my aim was poor and it came down on Lt. Smith. He survived and we remained friends in spite of that. It took several of us to get the suspect to the ground and a call went down to the jail to bring up some leg irons to be used as hand cuffs.
I remember the suspect complaining to us afterwards that we had misled him into believing we were nice guys; that we were taking him home. Maybe we did mislead him; but only in an effort to keep him happy long enough for the safe transport to the station. Thanks to Jahn for reminding me of those couple of hours from back then.
Before leaving the memories of the old 2nd Floor DWI room; there was a tall fellow who operated the breathalyzer machine, Officer Kellum, ( may have had an "s" Kellums ) had a wonderfully wry sense of humor. We had a young guy blow into the machine one time who kept wondering how he’d done on the “test”. Rather than give him a straight answer, Tommie Kellum asked him if he was familiar with the television show, “Hawaii Five O”.
“Yea, I watch the show all the time.”, nodding his head. There was a look of puzzlement on his face as to why such a silly question had been asked of him.
“At the end of each show McGarret looks over to Danno and says something to him; do you remember what he says?” Officer Kellum handed us the printed test results.
“Book him Danno?” The suspect pulled his shoulders in hoping he’d gotten the right answer.
“That’s right! Book him Danno!” The print out showed nearly twice the legal limit as we all had a good laugh, even the suspect joined in.
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