A mayor in Florida has been arrested for drunken driving after she allegedly followed a couple home, crashed into their mailbox and parked her car on the lawn. RadarOnline.com can reveal.
On August 28, Naples Mayor Teresa Heitmann, 61, was arrested after she agreed to sobriety tests and administered two breath tests at the Naples Detention Center, which showed her blood alcohol content to be 0.155 and 0.169, police said from Naples. Department.
The legal limit in Florida is 0.08.
According to the Naples daily newsPolice received a 911 call from a man around 10 p.m. reporting that he and his wife had been followed home by a woman driving a silver car.
The caller told the dispatcher, “I think the mayor is drunk and she’s just literally – oh, she just ran over our mailbox.”
The coordinator asks: “Did the mayor do that?”
The caller replies, “I don’t know, she claims to be the mayor. I don’t know who she is.”
The caller then asks for her name and she clearly says she is “Mayor Teresa Heitmann.”
Officers arrived on scene and Heitmann told officers she is “not the mayor right now,” dash camera footage shows.
Police spoke with the couple, who said Heitmann’s silver Porsche almost ran the stop sign and they had to hit the brakes.
The resident also told police they were going to call the police and Heitmann said, “Call the police… she is the mayor and nothing will happen,” but Heitmann told police she would “never tell them she was the mayor .”
Heitmann also told officers that the couple almost hit her at a roundabout. She told police she wasn’t following the couple, but when the officer told her they were in front of the other people’s house, she “rolled her eyes and asked what was going on.”
Police said she had “glassy, watery eyes” and a “slow, slurred speech consistent with intoxication.”
After failing field sobriety tests, officers placed Heitmann under arrest and charged her with driving under the influence.
She left jail on Aug. 29 after waiving her arraignment, which under state law counts as her plea of not guilty.
She is due back in court on September 18, officials said.
In a statement, City Manager Jay Boodheshwar said that “city employees were saddened to hear about the incident involving the mayor” and that they “know this is a difficult time for Mayor Heitmann and will give her the space she needs.”
Heitmann is currently serving her second term as mayor of the city.