Asked to rate his level of intoxication after crash, Bluffton man says 7 out of 10

A Bluffton man was charged with driving under the influence, driving under suspension and as a habitual traffic offender early Sunday morning after he was found bloodied inside a vehicle that crashed near Westbury Park.

A Bluffton police officer was sent to the area of Plantation Park Drive around 12:45 a.m. after an anonymous caller said a vehicle “drove into the woods” behind Domino’s Pizza, according to a Bluffton Police Department report.

A second caller said she saw the vehicle “crash twice” as it drove down Plantation Park Drive and that it stopped at the entrance of Westbury Park.

When the officer found the vehicle, the back bumper was “dragging on the ground” and the left rear tire was flat and appeared shredded “as if the driver continued to drive after the tire was flat,” the report said.

The driver, who was still in the front seat, was wearing a shirt covered in blood. The officer wrote in the report that the man’s nose was also very swollen, his speech was slurred and that his movements were slow and “sluggish.”

The officer asked the man to say how impaired he felt on a scale of zero to 10 and the man replied “seven,” the report said.

The man was placed in an ambulance where he exhibited six clues of intoxication when the officer administered a field sobriety test.

He allegedly told the officer that he had struck a “curb and a tree,” but was unable to say where.

The man was then taken to Hilton Head Hospital.

The officer noted in the report that the man has three prior DUI convictions from 2010 and 2012.

After he was treated at the hospital, he was taken to the Beaufort County Detention Center.

This story was originally published December 6, 2017 at 2:52 PM with the headline "Asked to rate his level of intoxication after crash, Bluffton man says 7 out of 10."