Man Drove 6 Miles With Wife on SUV's Roof: Cops

Why, yes, it happened in Florida
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 30, 2016 7:33 AM CDT
Man Drove 6 Miles With Wife on SUV's Roof: Cops
Richard Addy   (Martin County Sheriff's Office)

Take my wife, please—off the roof of my car. Cops say a Florida man drove 6 miles with his spouse clinging to the top of his SUV, the Smoking Gun reports. Per a police report, Officer Christopher Ruediger was pulling up to an intersection in Stuart shortly after midnight on March 22 when he saw 50-year-old Elizabeth Addy on the roof of a 2011 Toyota Sequoia driven by her husband, 69-year-old Richard Addy. Elizabeth Addy "was yelling for help and waving her hands at me," Ruediger notes, so he pulled the car over and helped her down. The story in the police report: Per Richard Addy, he and his wife had been drinking together at a bar in the resort where they were staying and gotten into a tiff, so he decided to "leave the scene."

He claims he didn't realize initially she had leaped on top of his car and that the only reason he didn't stop when he finally did hear her "banging on the roof" was because he didn't have a cellphone with which to call the cops. Instead, he cruised by a courthouse, hoping to find "police presence," and when he didn't, he just continued on his way—rooftop passenger and all. Richard Addy reeked of booze, per the officer, but charges against him include only reckless driving and the probably-not-often-used "permitting a passenger to ride on the exterior of the vehicle." "I've been doing this job for over 20 years and I've never seen anything like that before," another Stuart cop tells WPBF. (The opposite of that story: a woman who found a car parked on her roof.)

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