He drove in, but couldn't manage to drive thru

The black Dodge Ram was parked just past the drive-through window at the Zaxby’s restaurant in north Macon, Ga. The truck’s engine was still running, but its driver was passed out at the wheel.

A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy showed up at the Northside Drive eatery and soon determined that the man in the truck was out cold. The deputy’s write-up of the Oct. 8 incident said that he “very loudly called out for (the man) several times in an effort to wake him. However, that was unsuccessful.”

The deputy looked into the truck and saw a prescription pill bottle and, in the truck’s cup holder, a Bud Light.

The deputy called for an ambulance and began giving the man what is known as a sternum rub, a test for unconsciousness, to rouse him. “Almost immediately, (the man) began to reach for the gear shift,” the deputy wrote in his report.

“Fearing (he) might attempt to drive away while still disoriented, I asked him to turn the vehicle off.”

The man told the deputy he had “simply fallen asleep” on his way to pick up his daughter and refill his blood-pressure medicine. The man figured he’d been at the Zaxby’s for 10 minutes at the most, but a restaurant employee said it was more like half an hour.

The driver’s speech was “slurred and mostly unintelligible,” the report said. He was “unsteady on his feet” and when he tried to walk, “his knees buckled.”

The man was jailed on a DUI charge.

This story was originally published October 26, 2016 at 2:37 PM with the headline "He drove in, but couldn't manage to drive thru."