Drunk drivers remain a problem on Habersham’s roads.
There were 14 DUI arrests by Habersham County Sheriff’s deputies over a five-day span this week, including three in a row on Thursday night.
One bizarre incident came in the early hours of Saturday morning, when Cornelia Police spotted a truck pulling a cement mixer with no lights on at Hoyt and Wayside Streets. The car turned and almost hit the patrol car, prompting the officer to begin a traffic stop.
The car was weaving across the center line repeatedly before pulling into a drug store parking lot and jumping the sidewalk.
The driver – later identified as 19-year-old Giovanni Ramirez-Lara of Cornelia – was engaged by the officer, who “smelled a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from his breath and vehicle,” according to the incident report.
Ramirez refused to take a field sobriety test, Cornelia Police said, and he was arrested while shouting obscenities at the officer.
Ramirez also had a warrant out with Habersham County for sexual battery from an incident in July 2022.
He was arrested on charges of DUI, failure to maintain lane, headlights out, failure to obey a stop sign, defective tires and driving while license suspended or revoked.
Despite numbers that would make even some larger counties cringe, DUI numbers are actually down year over year in December and January. There were 18 DUIs in December 2021 and 27 more in January 2022, with 13 in December of 2022 and 23 in January 2023.
In 2022, Sgt. Kris Hall of the Habersham County HEAT Unit had 204 DUI arrests, up from 168 in 2021.
Hall told The Northeast Georgian in January that In the daytime, around one in six drivers is impaired in some way, and at night, that goes up to roughly three or so out of every six drivers is impaired. Hall added that stricter laws and tougher sentences will be the only way to stop this upward trend.