Sid­ney D’an­drande of Ari­ma has been jailed for six months and banned from dri­ving for life af­ter plead­ing guilty to a fourth DUI charge fol­low­ing a ve­hic­u­lar ac­ci­dent.

D’an­drande was hand­ed the sen­tence by a Tu­na­puna Mag­is­trate yes­ter­day. He was ar­rest­ed and charged by Cpl Harp­er, of the Tu­na­puna Po­lice Sta­tion, af­ter col­lid­ing with po­lice cruis­er along the West­bound Lane of the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way in the vicin­i­ty of the Pasea walkover.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, of­fi­cers of the North­ern Di­vi­sion DUI/Speed Team and of­fi­cers of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Fire Ser­vice (TTFS) were at the scene of a five-car smash up.

There, the of­fi­cers blocked two lanes of the high­way us­ing two marked po­lice cruis­ers and a fire truck while wait­ing on oth­er emer­gency of­fi­cials to ar­rive to treat the in­jured dri­vers. Dur­ing this time, DUI of­fi­cers ob­served a dark coloured wag­on dri­ving at a high-speed ap­proach­ing.

The of­fi­cers at­tempt­ed to stop the dri­ver us­ing their flash and red sig­nal lights, how­ev­er, the dri­ver, who ap­plied brakes, skid­ded sev­er­al me­ters caus­ing both of­fi­cers to jump out of way.

The ve­hi­cle lat­er col­lid­ed with the rear of one of the po­lice ve­hi­cles. Of­fi­cers rushed to the dri­ver’s aid where a strong scent of al­co­hol was em­a­nat­ing from the man’s breathe.

He was is­sued a breathal­yser test which record­ed 98ug/100ml which is 63ug/100ml over the le­gal lim­it. Cpl Harp­er con­duct­ed fur­ther in­ves­ti­ga­tions in which he dis­cov­ered that the dri­ver, D’an­drande, had three pri­or DUI charges. He was ar­rest­ed and sub­se­quent­ly charged with the of­fence. Two dri­vers in­volved in the ac­ci­dent were al­so found to be over the le­gal lim­it and were charged for DUI.