[poncho-mike]

Friday night at 3 AM, my cat was acting strangely. It was meowing and running to the door of the bedroom, then running back to me. I thought maybe it wanted me to follow it, so I got up and followed it to the bathroom.

In my back yard, there was a car sitting there with the headlights on. It's not a place a car would normally be. My lot is almost 2 acres, so to get there you would either need to come in the driveway and drive to the top of the hill, or you would need to go off the road, drive across a fairly steep drop. I watched for a few minutes, and I couldn't see any movement. We don't have street lights, so all I could see was the glare of the headlights.

There is a very large oak tree at the back of the property, so my first thought were that somebody may have run off the road and hit the oak, but the headlights would have been damaged. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I decided to get my gun just in case.

A few minutes later, I went back to the window and saw a person stumbling around the back corner of the lot. He wandered about 50 feet down hill, then leaned up against another tree. I decided he was just drunk.

In the meantime, my wife had called the police. The dispatch said the police were about ten minutes out, and told me not to go outside. Police arrived shortly thereafter. The guy was still leaning up against the tree, the cop told him to go stand in front of his patrol car. The guy then sat down on the road and the cop apparently talked to him for a few minutes. By this time, I had walked out onto the back deck.

The officer said it was a young man who had too much to drink. He hadn't hit anything with the car. The officer said the young man had called some of his friends to come get him and the car, and that unless I objected, he was going to let his friends take him and the car home. I had no objections.

I was very surprised the officer let the guy go with no DUI. He wasn't driving, wasn't in the car, and he hadn't damaged anything. A county deputy responded, he was a very nice older guy. His friends arrived, got the car and their buddy and left.

The next day, I went up to the road to see how he ended up where he was. He went between a Neighborhood Watch sign and a brick subdivision sign, barely missing both. He was extremely lucky he didn't damage his car and he got off with a stern talk from the deputy.

So what do you think? Should he have gotten a DUI?