It took less than one drink to get Shannon Wilcutt busted for felony DUI

When the woman paid her bill and left the restaurant, the businessman was right behind her, cell phone in hand. When she ran a stop sign in the parking lot, he called the police.

By the time the cops showed up a few minutes later, the woman already had parked at the Chandler Mall, less than a mile from Mimi's. She was buying bath salts when the businessman pointed her out to the cops.

Thanks to the businessman's intervention, Shannon Wilcutt was eventually charged with three felony counts: a DUI above 0.08, a DUI with a child under 15 in the car, and drug possession.

Justice served, right?

Hardly.

Turns out, those glasses of white wine were actually water. Wilcutt was groggy because she'd just had dental surgery. She'd thought a mimosa might be soothing, but when it stung her sutures, she pushed it away half-finished.

The proof is in the police report: Wilcutt's blood alcohol content was only 0.02, the equivalent of one drink. She wasn't even close to the legal limit.

No matter. Shannon Wilcutt was busted anyway. Her little boy was taken from her as she was handcuffed, arrested, and entered into the justice system. That meant weekly random alcohol tests, weekly phone calls to a court-appointed "counselor," and the looming possibility of heavy fines and a three-year license revocation, not to mention jail time.

It would take two years and thousands of dollars for Wilcutt to be vindicated.

Here's what really happened.

Shannon Wilcutt wasn't a big drinker, and she'd certainly never been in trouble with the law before. Her husband, Bryan, is a software engineer working on his doctorate in computer science. Shannon is a homemaker who's taking classes at the University of Phoenix, though at the time of her arrest she worked in Walgreens' inventory department. The couple have three boys and a home on a quiet street in the older part of Chandler.

On the morning of May 18, 2006, Wilcutt, then 34, underwent surgery to remove a bad set of dentures. The dentist used Novocain but didn't knock her out. After the procedure, her dentist cleared her to leave — and prescribed hydrocodone for the pain. (That medication is a generic form of Vicodin.)

Too tired to cook, Wilcutt took 4-year-old John to Mimi's Café, a chain restaurant. She ate soup and a muffin and drank half a mimosa, but the orange juice irritated her mouth, which was raw and sore from the surgery. Feeling dehydrated, she switched to water. The waitress brought her goblet after goblet.

At the very end of the meal, Wilcutt took one hydrocodone pill. She wanted to stop at the mall and get bath salts, a trip she estimated at 10 minutes, max. She figured the pain pill would kick in as she reached her house and settled into the tub.

She didn't realize that Steven Ceballes, the aforementioned businessman, had already made a phone call.

Ceballes is the owner of a commercial landscape company called Horticulture West. Dining with clients, he noticed that Wilcutt was woozy. He suspected alcohol, according to a statement he gave police, so he called the cops. He then followed Wilcutt's minivan to the Chandler Mall to point her out to the officers. (Reached by phone, Ceballes declined comment and told New Times not to include his name in this story. Then he hung up.)

At the time, Wilcutt was suffering from numerous health problems. She was significantly overweight, asthmatic, and had a herniated disc in her back. So although she did fine on some of the field sobriety tests, like counting to 30, she had difficulty walking and turning and standing on one leg.

She was also freaking out. She felt herself gasping for breath; right in front of the police officers, she took a hit on her inhaler.

Numerous academic studies have shown that inhalers can artificially increase a breathalyzer's blood alcohol reading. But the cops administered the breath test anyway, just minutes after she used her inhaler, Wilcutt says. Sure enough, it gave an inflated reading of 0.048.

Even that, of course, is well under the legal limit. But the cops were convinced Wilcutt was impaired, possibly by drugs. She said she'd taken one hydrocodone pill, but they were convinced she'd had at least two. The police report notes that Wilcutt's eyes were heavy and "her speech was slow and slurred."

"I had no teeth in," she says now, laughing. "I had just had my dentures removed, remember?"

The sketchy sobriety tests, plus Wilcutt's admission that she'd taken a hydrocodone pill, were enough to book her. She was handcuffed and taken to a jail cell, where she waited for her husband to pick her up. (John, terrified, was separated from his mother and taken to the police station to wait with the officers.)

It took nearly five months for DPS to return Wilcutt's drug screen. Turns out, she had taken just one hydrocodone, the prescribed dosage. Meanwhile, her blood test confirmed Wilcutt's protestations that she hadn't been swilling wine. Blood tests are significantly more accurate than portable breathalyzers like the one police initially used. Wilcutt's test put her blood alcohol content at 0.022 — way under the legal limit of 0.08.

Chandler Police Detective David Ramer tells me that didn't matter. A witness said she was driving badly. (Never mind that the witness also mistook water for wine. Makes you wonder about his powers of perception, doesn't it?) They also knew she'd been driving with a little kid in the car. And there was hydrocodone in her blood — the fact that it was legally prescribed doesn't matter if it affected her driving. Police are still convinced it did, Ramer says.

So police recommended three felony charges. The county attorney agreed.

Something weird happened in the process. Chandler Police had recommended that Shannon Wilcutt be charged with "being impaired to the slightest degree," a charge that allows cops to use discretion and charge someone with DUI, even if their blood alcohol content is as low as 0.02. But when the Maricopa County Attorney's Office indicted her, Wilcutt was instead charged with DUI above 0.08 — a ludicrous charge on its face, and one that prosecutors could never possibly prove in court. (The County Attorney's Office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Ultimately, though, the details didn't matter. In cases like these, it's still up to the accused to prove innocence, or face trial. And Shannon Wilcutt was never going to plead guilty to any charge of driving while impaired.

"I'm Italian-Irish," she says, describing her willingness to fight. "And I knew I wasn't guilty."

She had an added incentive. The Wilcutts were in the process of getting approval to adopt a pair of kids out of the foster care system. They worried that, even absent a conviction, the nature of the charges could derail their plan.

Last month, the county attorney dropped all charges. The part that still stings? The Wilcutts can never recoup the $12,000 they spent in legal fees, money they had to borrow money from friends and family.

"We essentially didn't have a Christmas because we were making payments to people," Bryan Wilcutt says.

The Wilcutts' adoption plans are moving forward. They're excited about adding to their family.

But it's hard to put the events of last year behind them.

"These were just bizarre circumstances that collided in one day to cause this," Bryan Wilcutt acknowledges. "But there are checkpoints that should make sure that a case like this doesn't go any further.

"When they saw the results of her blood and alcohol tests, this should have all gone away."

Your immediate reaction to that story is probably much like mine. Yes, it's scary, and it cost the Wilcutts plenty, but it was an aberration. The circumstances were bizarre. You and I have nothing to worry about.

Then I talked to Diana Sifford.

Sifford, 52, is a slim, attractive woman with a job in midlevel management at a local healthcare company. She was at first nervous about telling her story; she knows people immediately jump to conclusions, and she's not sure she wants to put herself out there. Plus, she's passionately opposed to drunk driving — she wants to make that clear.

Her story, though, is just as frightening as Shannon Wilcutt's.

Sifford was driving home from a George Thorogood concert last October. It was the first time she'd gone out in months; she'd had back surgery five weeks before and was taking time to heal up. The concert was fun, but by midnight, she was looking forward to bed.