Tampa area man behind the wheel of a driving school’s car was twice the DUI limit, FHP says
Though erratic driving in Florida isn’t unusual especially from a car sporting “Student Driver” warnings, seeing it at 11:20 on a Friday night prompted a Florida Highway Patrol officer to make a stop in Port Richey.
What Trooper Grant Galloway says he found: an open 24-pack case of Natural Light beer and a driver who smelled of alcohol, could barely stand or talk, but could blow to measure his breath alcohol content. Those tests came back 0.226 and 0.208, Galloway wrote in an arrest report The legal limit is 0.08.
Hudson’s Gregory Sorensen, 54, was booked on one count of misdemeanor DUI. As of Sunday morning, he remained in Pasco County Jail.
Driving, drifting, fumbling and stumbling?
Also, as of Sunday morning, Sorenson wasn’t listed among the instructors on the All Florida Safety Institute Driving School website. It was a Ford Fusion carrying All Florida’s name, website, phone number and license plate DRVED71, that Galloway wrote was “drifting within its lane” at 11:20 p.m. Friday as he followed the car north on U.S. 19. Galloway decided to stop the the car “to make sure the driver was not experiencing a medical episode.”
Galloway wrote Sorensen, “had an odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from his breath along with slurred speech and bloodshot, watery eyes.”
When asked for his driver’s license, Sorensen produced a Chase Bank card. As he “was fumbling for his driver’s license,” Galloway wrote, “I observed an open 24-pack of Natural Light beer in the back seat.”
Sorensen, Galloway wrote, had a hard time just getting out of the car and leaned against it as he walked toward the FHP cruiser. He couldn’t understand the instructions for one of the physical DUI exercise tests, the report said, “performed poorly” overall and blew the aforementioned measures of blood alcohol content.
