6 Va. Alcohol Agents Surround Female Student, Pull Gun on Her, & Throw Her in Jail for Buying Water [View all]

[JPZenger]

Last edited Fri Jun 28, 2013, 07:11 PM - Edit history (3)

We had heard that the Va. Alcohol Beverage Commission agents had orders to get tough on college students. I guess this is their first big successful bust.

A 20 year female University of Virginia student went into the Harris Twetter supermarket in Charlottesville at 10 pm with 2 female friends to buy some bottled water and ice cream. Here's the account of the Charlottesville Daily Progress of what happened next. The paper says the local prosecutors confirmed the student's story.

http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/bottled-water-purchase-leads-to-night-in-jail-for-uva/article_b5ab5f62-df9b-11e2-81c4-0019bb30f31a.html

Excerpt:

"When a half-dozen men and a woman in street clothes closed in on University of Virginia student Elizabeth Daly, 20, she and two roommates panicked. That led to Daly spending a night and an afternoon in the Regional Jail. ... A group of state Alcoholic Beverage Control agents clad in plainclothes approached her, suspecting the blue carton of LaCroix sparkling water to be a 12-pack of beer. Police say one of the agents jumped on the hood of her car. She says one drew a gun. Unsure of who they were, Daly tried to flee the darkened parking lot. "They were showing unidentifiable badges after they approached us, but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform," she recalled Thursday.

"I couldn't put my windows down unless I started my car, and when I started my car they began yelling to not move the car, not to start the car. They began trying to break the windows. My roommates and I were ... terrified," Daly stated.

...ABC agents who charged her with three felonies. Prosecutors withdrew those charges Thursday, but Daly still can't understand why she sat in jail. Agents charged Daly with two counts of assaulting a law enforcement officer and one count of eluding police, all Class 6 felonies carrying a maximum penalty of five years in prison and $2,500 in fines per offense.

Daly incurred the assault charges when she "grazed" two agents with her SUV, according to court records. She drove the SUV past the agents after her front-seat passenger, in a panic, yelled at Daly to "go, go, go" and climbed into the rear of the vehicle to gain space from the men on her side of the car, the records state. The women dialed 911 as they pulled out of the parking lot to report what was happening and ask whether the agents were police officers. Daly said she was planning to drive to a police station."


I have one question - who let Barney Fife carry a gun?

"But Andy, I had to pull out the gun, she had cookie dough ice cream!"