DUI Case Reopened

Investigators have reopened the case to decide whether the sheriff's finance director was driving drunk this weekend.

The turnaround was prompted when new witnesses came forward Tuesday to give a first-hand account of what they saw when Emily Vernon allegedly crashed her pickup around midnight Saturday.

In an exclusive interview with Hernando Today, Natasha Duncan described sitting in a pickup at the intersection of Daly and Lake Lindsey roads when a pickup headed east veered off the road in their direction.

Duncan's boyfriend was behind the wheel and he backed out of the way as the oncoming pickup crashed into a metal road sign. The resounding "bang" made Natasha Duncan scream.

"She almost hit us," Duncan said.

By the glow of the headlights cutting through the dark night, Duncan could see a woman climb out of the truck and begin inspecting the damage to the grill and tires. She didn't answer when Duncan's boyfriend asked if she was OK.

Duncan immediately noticed that she was acting odd. The woman was stumbling around; her hand slipped several times as she reached for the door handle.

"You could tell from a hundred yards away that she was drunk," Duncan said.

Almost immediately after the crash, two vehicles that had been following the pickup since U.S. 41 showed up on the scene. Assuming those witnesses would handle the situation, Duncan and her boyfriend left.

Deputies say they discovered a water bottle holding alcohol inside the truck; Vernon's breath had a faint odor of alcohol; she admitted to drinking a half bottle of wine; she said she ran off the road because she wasn't "paying attention."

But one of the witnesses that had followed Vernon to the scene took away her keys before deputies arrived. When authorities did show up, she was outside the vehicle. No one interviewed Saturday could place Vernon behind the wheel, nor had they seen the actual crash.

Traffic Deputy Gisele Mulverhill concluded that there was no way to prove the "actual physical control" of the vehicle. With her supervisor's approval, she worked the scene strictly as a traffic crash and did not conduct field sobriety tests.

Vernon, 39, did not return a call for comment on Tuesday.

'Defense Attorney's Dream'

Hernando Today polled several DUI lawyers around the state and most said an arrest could have been made. But they doubt whether the case would progress very far in court before it was dismissed.

Generally speaking, at the base of every crime there is a "corpus delecti," the body of evidence, the proof a crime was committed.

The dead body in a murder case is the term's origin, but it's come to apply to any number of other crimes. Like DUI.

When given the circumstances around the crash, attorney Joe Hutchison of St. Petersburg said the cops "definitely could have arrested her. But it's difficult to prove she was behind the wheel."

"Circumstantial evidence can go a long way," says Stephen Higgins of St. Augustine. But a DUI case hinges on a myriad of factors, especially with a single vehicle accident.

Vernon's admission to driving falls under the Florida Accident Report Privilege. Any information given by a driver is immune from criminal penalty until the deputy "switches hats" so to speak and begins a criminal investigation. Once notified that a DUI investigation is underway, any statements made are fair game.

"The right thing would be to arrest her, but she would have won the case," said attorney Randy Goodis of South Florida.

Even in light of the new witnesses, attorney Lee Lockett of Jacksonville has never heard of a DUI arrest days after the fact. The witnesses would have to be able to pick the suspect out of a photo lineup first for it to be valid.

Even then, "it would make for a messy case," he said.

Attorney Steven Casanova in Melbourne pointed out that a misdemeanor such as DUI has to occur in an officer's presence. Even with the new witnesses, without conducting field sobriety tests or storing the wine in the car kept as evidence, no probable cause exists.

"This is a defense attorney's dream," he said.