CEDAR CITY — A woman was arrested in Iron County on Tuesday after reportedly driving on the opposite side of Interstate 15 between Beaver and Cedar City for several miles.
Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Bambi Baie told Cedar City News that earlier that morning, dispatchers had fielded a flurry of calls from motorists reporting a wrong-way driver heading south in the northbound lanes of I-15 just south of mile marker 100.
“We had multiple callers, so we headed up north,” Baie said, “and we had troopers from up north head south.”
She said after a witness reported seeing the car drive across the median in the area of mile marker 95 and begin traveling the correct direction on the southbound side, “all of a sudden, the calls stopped.”
“So we were looking for (the car) in southbound traffic, and we had a trooper still looking for it northbound to see if maybe they got redirected in the right direction (if they intended to go that way),” Baie said.
She added that UHP also sent a trooper out on SR-20, which connects to I-15 at Exit 95, but they didn’t spot the vehicle.
Shortly thereafter, Baie said, a UHP lieutenant and trooper spotted the vehicle, described as a silver Hyundai Azera sedan, heading south on I-15 near mile marker 84, but before they got to the car to pull it over, the driver had quickly pulled off and was pretending to be asleep in her car on the side of the roadway.
“With witnesses calling in and giving us information about her driving patterns and what we saw in field sobriety, she was arrested for DUI,” Baie said, adding that the driver admitted to troopers that she had been driving on the wrong side of the interstate.
The driver of the car, identified as 34-year-old Kathleen Heun of Brigham City, was booked into Iron County Jail in Cedar City on Tuesday afternoon on suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, driving on the wrong side of a roadway and being in possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia.
This report is based on information provided by law enforcement and may not contain the full scope of findings. Persons arrested or charged are presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law or as otherwise decided by a trier-of-fact.
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.