Following an evidentiary hearing, the trial court granted Randall Sebastian Hogans’s motion to suppress the contraband seized from his vehicle. The State appeals, claiming that the trial court erred in finding that a law enforcement officer was not permitted to ask a third party for consent to search Hogans’s vehicle during a first-tier encounter. We agree with the State that under the circumstances the officer was permitted to ask for consent to search. We reverse and remand with direction that the trial court reconsider the motion to suppress because the trial court’s ruling was based on an erroneous legal theory and because the trial court avoided resolving certain conflicts in the evidence. On appeal from a ruling on a motion to suppress, we must construe the evidence most favorably to affirming the trial court’s factual findings and judgment. We accept the trial court’s factual and credibility determinations unless they are clearly erroneous, and the factual findings will be upheld if they are supported by any evidence. The trial court’s application of the law to undisputed facts, however, is subject to a de novo standard of review. Citation omitted. Peterson v. State , 294 Ga. App. 128, 129 1 668 SE2d 544 2008. So viewed, the evidence showed that a police sergeant initiated a traffic stop of a Cadillac Escalade because he suspected its tinted windows violated the law. Hogans was driving and Camille Blakely was in the passenger’s seat. The officer approached the vehicle, which displayed a drive-out tag, and spoke with Blakely, who told him that the vehicle was hers and that she had just bought it. Notwithstanding Blakely’s statements to the officer, Hogans and his wife owned the Cadillac Escalade. Blakely testified that she lied to the officer because she thought it would keep Hogans from being arrested for driving with a suspended license.
Although the windows were obscured, the officer decided to give Blakely a verbal warning because the vehicle was new. The officer asked Hogans for his license, but Hogans handed him a Florida identification card and claimed that he and Blakely were on their way to Florida to “get his license fixed.” A computer check showed that Hogans’s license had been suspended indefinitely. Based on this information, the officer arrested Hogans and placed him in the back of the patrol car.
