Community Police & Fire
Gig Harbor Police Blotter: DUI suspect claims he just came from AA meeting
Editor’s note: The Blotter is written based on information provided by Gig Harbor Police and Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One.
Gig Harbor police arrested a 67-year-old Olalla man on suspicion of driving while intoxicated at around 1:30 p.m. May 19 in the parking lot of the Home Depot store on Borgen Boulevard.
The man told police he had been sober since 2020 and had just come from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Nonetheless, officers said they smelled alcohol on the man while investigating a minor, non-injury collision.
Breath tests, to which the suspect agreed, showed him to be well above the legal limit for alcohol. He still claimed that he had not had anything to drink that day — although in the second telling, his most recent drink had been the night before, not three years ago.
Officers issued the man a citation and returned him to his home in Olalla.
Don’t leave your joint in center console of your car
A Gig Harbor police officer cited a 35-year-old Gig Harbor woman for driving around with a joint and other marijuana products in the center console of her car around 11 p.m. May 21.
The officer pulled the woman over because she was driving a car with expired tabs. She argued that point, though the officer’s report indicates the tabs had been expired since February.
The officer told the woman he smelled marijuana in the car. She responded that she had some in the car that she just bought, and produced a joint from the center console. The officer told the woman that state marijuana law is similar to the state’s open container law for alcohol, in that the marijuana needs to be secured and out of reach of the driver. The woman argued that point, too, but to no avail.
The officer cited her for the marijuana violation, expired tabs and for driving with a suspended license.
Man with mental health issues taken to jail
Officers arrested a 26-year-old Gig Harbor man suffering an apparent mental health crisis on May 22 after he repeatedly refused to leave a local business.
The owners of an insurance agency on Pioneer Way called 911 three times that day asking police to remove the 26-year-old. The first time, he was using the business’s electrical outlet to charge a cell phone. The second time, he was eating lunch. Officers legally trespassed from the location about a week earlier.
An officers wrote that he took the man into custody after “a brief struggle.” The report did not describe the nature of that struggle.
The report noted that the suspect “has mental health concerns” that have been referred to a designated crisis responder from Pierce County, but he was still the subject of “on-going trespass complaints.”
The previous day, officers spoke with the same man outside the Civic Center building on Grandview Street. He was walking around the adjacent skate park, vacant at the time, without pants around 8:30 p.m. The report noted the man’s odd mannerisms but said a DCR had contacted him the previous day, and “a committal was not appropriate at that time.”
Officers took the man to the Kitsap County Jail.