“The officer who made the arrest, Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins, an eight-year department veteran, had staked out the 7-Eleven because of complaints about drug activity, she wrote in her report.
She pulled over Rushing because he failed to come to a full stop before pulling out of the convenience store parking lot and because he was driving 42 mph in a 30 mph zone, according to her report.
Daniel Rushing buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other week. (July 27, 2016) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)
When Rushing opened his wallet, she saw that he had a concealed weapons permit, she wrote. He told her that he had a gun, and she asked him to step out of his car, a small Chevy.
That’s when she spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were,” she wrote.
“I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic,” she wrote.
She asked for permission to search his vehicle, the report says, and Rushing agreed.
“I didn’t have anything to hide,” he said. “I’ll never let anyone search my car again.”
Riggs-Hopkins and other officers spotted three other pieces of the suspicious substance in his car, according to the report.
“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.’”
His arrest report confirms that he tried to tell them.
“Rushing stated that the substance is sugar from a Krispie Kreme Donut that he ate,” Riggs-Hopkins wrote.”
He deserved more than 37K
I had some dingbat broad pull me over many years ago. I missed the entrance to a burger place because the only entrance is further away from the place itself (another idiotic shopping center). so I pulled into a gas station and turned around.
She was a real Colombo. Then again, maybe not. Fortunately I had a witness in the car with me. After about 10 minutes of stupid talk and her checking the registration, uh duh, there was nothing I did wrong. What a dingbat.
She needed to go back to watching more T.J. Hooker.
Perhaps... and yet if the PD got sufficient shame out of this, it might also serve to reduce the number of such incidents.