Hershel Daniel Howard was found guilty in a bench trial of driving under the influence of alcohol and driving with an open container of alcohol. His sole claim on appeal is that the trial court should have granted his motion to suppress the evidence supporting the guilty verdicts because the police officer who stopped the vehicle he was driving did so without any reasonable basis under the Fourth Amendment. Because we find the officer had a reasonable basis to make an investigatory stop of the vehicle, the trial court correctly denied the motion to suppress. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of conviction. The evidence produced at the hearing on the motion to suppress showed the following: Two uniformed police officers drove their marked patrol cars to a house to serve a domestic violence arrest warrant on a male suspect who lived at the house. They drove down a short driveway to the house and parked the patrol cars. The house was located on a dirt road where only six other residences were located. The officers did not know what the suspect looked like and did not know what kind of vehicle he drove, although they did have some “information about a pickup and a trailer.” After being unable to find the suspect or anyone else at the house, one of the officers testified that he saw a pickup truck driven by a man stop on the road directly in front of the driveway to the house. The officer said the driver “looked up and saw us and kind of took off, which raised my suspicion a little bit.” Asked, “Who did you think was in the truck” the officer replied: “Well, I didn’t know. My first thought was it was the person I was looking for at the house.”
When the driver of the truck took off, the officer followed in his patrol car, ran the tag on the truck and determined it was not registered to the suspect, then stopped the truck to see if the driver was the suspect he was looking for. The officer testified that, in his five years of experience in serving arrest warrants, it was not uncommon that persons who know they are wanted drive someone else’s vehicle. The driver of the truck was not the suspect, however, but Howard, who identified himself as the suspect’s brother-in-law. Howard told the officer he was aware of the arrest warrant and that he drove to the house to make sure his brother-in-law had been arrested. During this conversation, the officer noticed a strong odor of alcohol coming from the truck, and in response to the officer’s question, Howard admitted he had been drinking. Howard also admitted he was drinking a beer in the truck just before the officer stopped him, and the officer saw a case of beer in the back seat of the truck. The officer asked Howard to step out of the truck to perform field sobriety tests, and when Howard failed to pass the tests, the officer arrested him on DUI and open container charges.
