New Canaan Police on Nov. 1 arrested a 42-year-old Stamford woman by warrant in connection with a single-car crash on White Oak Shade Road seven years ago, records show.
Police obtained a state Superior Court Judge Stephanie McLaughlin’s signature on the warrant in November 2018, just a few weeks after the crash.
According to an arrest warrant application filed by New Canaan Police Officer Matthew Blank and obtained by NewCanaanite.com through a public records request, the woman crashed in the area of 105 White Oak Shade Road (just north of Overlook Drive) around 1:16 a.m. on Oct. 21, 2018, a Sunday.
Arriving, Blank and other NCPD officers found that a vehicle had crossed the double-yellow line while traveling southbound and then crossed all the way across the northbound lane and struck a telephone pole that snapped, the arrest warrant application said.
On scene, Blank interviewed the driver and sole occupant of the vehicle (with New York state plates) where multiple airbags had deployed, and she told him “she was fine.”
She said that she was en route to her home in Darien and asked “Did I hit anyone.” Blank told her no. The woman didn’t know whether she’d been wearing her seatbelt at the time of the crash, and she told Blank that she wasn’t on any medications and had no medical impairments, he said in the affidavit.
New Canaan Fire and Emergency Medical Services arrived on scene, the latter transporting the woman to Norwalk Hospital “for further evaluation due to the severity of the crash.”
She told EMS personnel “that she had been drinking earlier in the night.”
Inside the car, “a pizza box was identified from Spiga, a restaurant in town,” the application said, and when the woman exited her Chevrolet, she “moved slowly and seemed uneasy on her feet.”
Blank said that based on his experience and training that she “was impaired due to alcohol or drugs.”
At the hospital, a blood sample was taken, and police obtained a search warrant for the blood results. They showed that she had 266 mg/dl of Ethanol in her system at 2:27 a.m. on Oct. 21., or a blood-alcohol level of .22, more than 2.5 times the legal limit.
Police charged her with driving under the influence and cited her for failure to drive right. New Canaan Police took custody of the woman on the active warrant at the Redding Police Department. She was released on $1,500 bond and scheduled to appear Nov. 12 in state Superior Court.