In what may seem like deja vu, another wrong-way driver was arrested Thursday morning on the Veterans Expressway. The same officer, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Ronald Evans, who arrested a driver Wednesday morning, arrested Lori Lee Downard on Thursday.
At 3:07 a.m., the FHP received calls that a car was traveling in northbound in the southbound lanes of SR-589 close to Van Dyke Road.
Downard, 49, was stopped close to the Hillsborough- Pasco County line on her way to her home in Zephyrhills. According to the FHP, she thought she was headed northbound on I-75. She took a field sobriety test and her breath sample was 0.115, police said. In Florida, .08 is the level at which drivers are considered impaired.
Neither of the incidents this weeks involved a crash. However five separate wrong-way crashes in the Tampa Bay area have killed 11 people this year.
