Alex Thomas
A Florida man will be spending some time in the ever-unpleasant DUI court after he decided to slug some booze and take his trusty lawnmower out for a spin, police say.
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Kenneth Alleshouse was allegedly “driving erratically” on Nov. 3, on a service road when the cops crashed his one-man mobile party. On their Facebook page, the Port St. Lucie Police Department wrote that the arresting officer “could smell a strong odor of alcohol emitting from his person.” The following investigation allegedly revealed that the 56-year-old’s blood alcohol level was three times over the legal limit — the BAC limit on a lawnmower is the same as the one for a car, .08.
Alleshouse’s case wasn’t helped by reports that he was carrying a case of Budweiser when the boys in blue nabbed him, per WPTV.
It’s not clear if he was allegedly coming back from the liquor store or beer distributor or if police think he was just bored and drunk and felt like taking the mower, manufactured by Red Snapper, out for a spin.
We don’t know how fast Alleshouse may have been going when his alleged drunken adventure came to an end, but according to the United States Lawn Mower Racing Society, stock mowers generally get up to a whopping 6 to 8 miles per hour, though if modified, they can get up to 85 mph.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first case of someone getting drunk and taking a lawnmower to the road. Late country music legend George Jones told this famous story (as reported in the Houston Press) about his own lawnmower trip:
Once, when I had been drunk for several days, [Jones’ second wife] Shirley [Corley] decided she would make it physically impossible for me to buy liquor. I lived about eight miles from Beaumont and the nearest liquor store. She knew I wouldn’t walk that far to get booze, so she hid the keys to every car we owned and left.
But she forgot about the lawn mower. I can vaguely remember my anger at not being able to find keys to anything that moved and looking longingly out a window at a light that shone over our property. There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat; a key glistening in the ignition.
I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did.
Police in Florida seem to have gotten pretty good at making DUI arrests on unconventional vehicles; last Thursday, 53-year-old Donna Byrne was arrested for allegedly riding drunk on a horse.
