It was a case of mistaken identity. Orlando Police thought they’d identified methamphetamine in a man’s car, when really, it was just the flaky remains of the Krispy Kreme doughnut glaze he’d enjoyed earlier. He’s now planning to sue the city for the arrest that stemmed from that mistake.
The Florida man said he used to treat himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday, and eat them in his car, The Orlando Sentinel reports. [warning: link contains video that autoplays]. But after police officers pulled him over last December and spotted a few flakes of glaze in his car that they thought were crystal methamphetamine, and arrested him, well, that routine is no more.
Police said in their report that he was pulled over in December because he didn’t come to a full stop before pulling out of a 7-Eleven parking lot, and because he was driving 42 mph in a 30 mph zone.
The officers had staked out the location because of reports of increased drug activity at the convenience store. Upon spotting the flakes, police first thought the substance was crack, the man said, before settling on meth. The report notes that “a rock like substance” was “on the floor board where his feet were.”
He tried to tell them it was the glaze from a doughnut, he said, which the arrest report confirms: “[The man] stated that that the substance is sugar from a Krispie Kreme Donut that he ate,” the arresting officer wrote.
Two roadside drug tests came back positive for the illegal substance, the man’s arrest report said, and he was taken away to county jail.
But when a state crime lab did another test several weeks later — finding that the substance wasn’t any kind of drug — he was cleared. Three days later, the State Attorney’s Office in Orlando formally dropped the case.
“It was incredible,” he said. “It feels scary when you haven’t done anything wrong and get arrested. … It’s just a terrible feeling.”
He’s now hired a lawyer and is planning to file a lawsuit to ask the city to pay him damages.
“I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said.
Unless you count “loving doughnuts so much you get the glaze all over your car” as a reason, of course.
Cops mistook Krispy Kreme doughnut glaze for meth, Orlando man says [The Orlando Sentinel]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist