A person has been charged with impaired driving after allegedly falling asleep while waiting for food at a drive-through in Aurora on Sunday afternoon.
Officers were called to a Wendy’s on Wellington Street East around 5 p.m. after an employee reported a person was passed out inside a vehicle in the drive-through line up.
York Regional Police Const. Andy Pattenden said that officers made multiple attempts to wake the person, but when that failed, they smashed the window.
“The person had placed an order for food, advanced up and basically was just asleep,” Pattenden told CTV News Toronto.
Video of the incident posted to social media by York Regional Police shows officers knocking on the passenger side window of the vehicle and using a flashlight to look inside.
The officers are then seen smashing the window and unlocking the door.
Pattenden said that officers noticed an “obvious smell of alcohol” when they opened the door.
The driver eventually woke up and was taken into police custody. The driver was given a breath test and blew more than four times the legal limit for alcohol, Pattenden said.
“Our protocol for a case like that is to take him to the hospital because it could be a medical emergency with the amount of alcohol in his system,” he said.
When the driver was released from the hospital, he was charged with impaired driving and driving with a blood-alcohol level of over 80 milligrams.
Pattenden described the incident as “shocking” but said that it isn’t uncommon for officers to stop impaired drivers on a Sunday afternoon.
“Unfortunately, it’s not an odd time to see somebody that intoxicated. We are seeing it 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “This is right across the GTA.”
Twenty-one drivers were charged with impaired driving last week in York Region, Pattenden said, and more than 100 were charged over the last month.
“We aren’t seeing people who, you know had a glass of wine and are driving, a couple beers. These are people who have consumed a lot of alcohol or drugs,” he said. “To get that much in your body, you knew what you were doing when you were consuming it and that person made that choice to get behind the wheel of a vehicle, which is really putting everyone’s life at risk.”
