Perez tells the officer she was coming from a friend’s business on Tacoma Avenue South. Then he asked the obvious question.
“Did you have anything to drink tonight?” the officer asked.
“I just had some wine while I was there,” Perez replies.
The officer pressed her on how much.
“I had a glass of wine, one glass of wine,” she said.
When he asks how big the glass was, she told him, “I think you might need to contact the business.”
The officer then asked her to rate herself on a scale of zero to ten, with zero being sober. She first answered that she wants to go home. Asked a second time, she rated herself a four.
The officer offered standardized field sobriety tests and told Perez more than once that she can decline.
“So it’s a series of tests that I take you through to make sure to see if you’re impaired by alcohol, or you’re not. Are you okay with doing that? It’s totally voluntary,” he said.
Perez told him she does not know what the tests are and that she is confused by all of it. She kept coming back to the same request to leave the scene of the accident. And repeatedly explained that she was “confused.”
“Not right now. I’d like to go home first,” she said before the officer shut that down.
“You’re not going to go home first. I’m going to tell you that right now, okay? So your options between the test, yes or no, that’s going to be determined tonight, right now, not when you go home. So would you like to take these tests or no?” he asked.
“And do I have a choice?” Perez asked.
“You do have a choice. You can either say yes, or you can say no. They’re totally voluntary tests,” the officer answered.
“Yeah, I would like to go home first,” she said.
He asked whether that is a no. She said yes, and he told her to put her hands behind her back.
Washington does not require drivers to take roadside sobriety tests. The refusal enhancement in her case comes from what happened later at Tacoma Police headquarters. According to the police report filed with the charge, she failed to give a usable breath sample in three attempts before the machine timed out.
