The Forgotten Lawmen Part 2: the Continuing Adventures of a South Dakota Game Warden by D.B. McCrea

Author:D.B. McCrea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2018-10-09T16:33:55+00:00

From a work perspective, my favorite hunting season was about to start. The arrival of the mourning dove season signaled the pending arrival of autumn and was a welcomed change to my law enforcement priorities. The past four months of checking fishermen and recreational boaters had worn pretty thin, and I had grown especially weary of dealing with a particular type of watercraft.

I had been a game warden for almost ten years when the scourge of the Earth was unleashed upon the sporting scene. This scourge was similar to what scientists had done when they tried to breed the American honey bee with the African bee. They wanted to capture the gentle, hard-working nature of the honey bee and infuse it with the aggressive nature of the African bee.

The African bees escaped and were now terrorizing Mexico and the southern United States. Jet skis, or personal watercraft, had been introduced by the boat manufacturers, and almost immediately a portion of their owners and operators began to terrorize the water.

Jet skis were to the water what ninja-style motorcycles were to the highway. Jet skis made up only twenty percent of boat registrations, but they had the dubious distinction of being involved in over half of all boating-related accidents, injuries and deaths.

One of the most difficult and challenging arrests I made during my career involved a combative 24-year-old jet skier. In June 1995 I was patrolling alone at Wall Lake when Jason E. crashed a borrowed jet ski nose-first into the side of a fiberglass speedboat with five adult passengers on board. His excuse for causing the near-fatal accident? No one bothered to show him where the brakes were on the jet ski.

I administered field sobriety tests the best I could to a drunk, mocking, dancing imbecile who thought the whole thing was a joke right up until he heard me say, “You’re under arrest for boating under the influence of alcohol.” That’s when Jason’s demeanor, and the demeanor of the fifty drunk and equally hostile onlookers, turned stone cold ugly. For the first time since I contacted an obstinate Jason on the shoreline of the lake, I heard him say something that I could actually understand. He said, plainly, “You aren’t putting me in handcuffs. I will [expletive] you up if you try.” I handcuffed Jason to the front as a very reluctant compromise.

Fortunately for me, Jason passed out and slept during the trip to Sioux Falls, and he didn’t wake up until a sheriff’s deputy and I shook him awake outside the emergency room at McKennan Hospital, where a nurse was waiting to take a blood sample.

Jason was brought before a magistrate judge on the afternoon of his initial appearance looking like all the other county inmates: shackled and wearing an orange jumpsuit. The deputy state’s attorney read the blood test results to the judge. Jason’s blood alcohol level was 0.25, more than three times the legal limit under the BUI statute. The sober Jason was quite different from the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.