Five days for drunk driver in East High Street business closure wreck

Gordon O’Neil Durrett, 40, has accepted a guilty plea to a charge of driving while intoxicated and will serve five days of a 90-day sentence.

“I bet you totaled your car,” said Judge Andrew Sneathern. “This is very expensive.”

The crash happened at around 10pm on March 16 when a black SUV traveling eastbound on High Street jumped the curb and took out three young fruit trees on its way to skid the frontage brick of a recently opened Sentara medical office building. The crash also destroyed a three-transformer pole at the intersection with 10th Street and Locust Avenue.

In court Thursday, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Nina-Alice Antony said a police officer reported the driver was unable to stand unassisted and that his condition precluded a safe attempt to field sobriety test. He said Durrett’s blood-alcohol content, when measured in jail, was 0.18, which is more than twice the legal driving limit.

The impact of the resulting fall of transformers from a Dominion power pole cracked the concrete pavement below, and insulating mineral oil from the transformers seeped into a city storm drain and washed away in Meade Creek. Dominion hired a contractor to repair the creek.

Despite a roughly 12-hour closure of the intersection to erect a new pole, damage to the underground cable kept Sentara’s 43,318-square-foot medical office building, which had opened in November with a urgent care Velocity, without electricity for a week.

Durrett’s attorney, Mark Duda of the public defender’s office, said his client will report to Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail at 5 p.m. May 11 to begin serving time the active sentence of five days.

Terms of the deal included a $250 fine, one year of good behavior and participation in an alcohol education program. The prosecutor proposed the loss of the driver’s license for a year until Duda proposed an adjustment.

“He is asking for a traditional restricted license for work purposes,” Duda told the court.

The judge agreed and ordered an ignition interlock that would require Durrett to blow into a pipe to start a vehicle’s engine before driving to work or attending a breath test.

“I hope this is something behind you,” Judge Sneathern said at the end of the hearing.

Both Duda and his client declined comment afterward.