Bad mix: intoxicated, ignorant

That's what a man calls himself after driving despite deputies' warnings.

By THOMAS LAKE, Times Staff Writer
Published October 16, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT Jeffery J. Hurley, 40, was charged with DUI after leaving a nightclub.

NEW PORT RICHEY - Five Bud Lights later, he left the club. It was after 3 a.m., time to go home, and, of course, his car was outside, his silver six-speed Pontiac GTO, because these are the suburbs, and people have to drive to get to bars in the suburbs, and then they come out, breathing heavy, foreheads numb, faced with a crucial decision.

Do I call 411, find a cab company, wait a long time, pay a lot of money, and then worry the next morning about retrieving my car?

Or do I crank the engine and pray?

Before you find out what Jeffery James Hurley did Sunday morning outside the Nocturnal B.Y.O.B. club at U.S. 19 and Trouble Creek Road, you should know he had at least two people telling him not to drive.

And that those two people were deputy sheriffs.

As Hurley put it on Monday, in a telephone interview with the St. Petersburg Times:

"I was intoxicated and I was ignorant. I didn't know they were officers."

A sheriff's report lays out the details of the incident. Hurley confirms them. Around 3:20 a.m., Hurley left the bar, apparently drunk. The off-duty deputies told him not to drive. He started to walk to Denny's, but then he turned around and approached his car.

Don't drive, they told him again.

I'm just getting cigarettes, he said, but then he started it up and careened out of the parking lot, nearly hitting two other cars, and headed south on U.S. 19 with the headlights off.

Pretty soon he saw the flashing lights.

"It really kind of tripped me up that they got there that quick," he recalled Monday.

Anyway, after he refused to perform field sobriety tests, they hauled him off to the Land O'Lakes jail on a DUI charge, where a breath test measured his blood alcohol at 0.151, nearly twice the level at which the state presumes impairment.

Hurley, 40, lives in Bainbridge, Ga., and works in Tarpon Springs. He went free on $250 bail. "Next time," he said, "I'll call a cab."

Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

[Last modified October 15, 2007, 22:10:12]