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Man charged with OWI just after picking up children at school

Man arrested for being 4x legal limit when picking up kids at school

DAYTON, Ind. (WISH) — A 36-year-old was arrested Wednesday after police found him driving erratically shortly after picking up children from an elementary school.

Dayton Police Department just after 3:30 p.m. Wednesday received a complaint about a reckless and erratic driver of a silver Kia Sorento SUV in the student pickup lane at Dayton Elementary School, according to a news release issued Thursday from Town Marshal Robert S. Taylor.

Police followed the SUV after the driver picked up two children. Police watched the driver cross the centerline and drive outside the lane of travel before stopping the SUV in the 6800 block of State Road 38. That’s just a few blocks southwest of the school, and just east of the point where State Road 38 splits into a divided highway next to the Subaru of Indiana Automotive plant.

The release says Drew Leffert refused field sobriety tests and a chemical test, so he was taken to the hospital where a search warrant was executed for a blood-alcohol test. A preliminary test recorded a 0.34 count, over four times Indiana’s threshold of 0.08 for drunken driving.

The Lafayette man remained in the Tippecanoe County jail on Thursday afternoon. The jail record listed preliminary charges neglect of a dependent, operating with a blood-alcohol count of 0.15 or more, OWI endangering a person, and OWI with a prior. Online records did not show a court case for Leffert.

Dayton is a town of about 1,350 residents located just east of Lafayette, about a 55-minute drive northwest of downtown Indianapolis.

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