AUGUSTA, Maine — A Biddeford man has been sentenced to five months in jail for driving drunk with his 4-year-old son in the passenger seat.
Authorities say Tony Leland, 46, pleaded guilty in Kennebec County Superior Court to operating under the influence and endangering the welfare of a child.
Leland was pulled over Nov. 2 by a sheriff’s deputy in Sidney responding to a report of an erratic car.
The officer found a bottle of alcohol between the two front seats.
Police say Leland’s blood-alcohol content was more than three times the legal limit to drive.
The Kennebec Journal reports that Leland was sentenced to a suspended 364-day sentence for the OUI offense and ordered to serve 150 days on the child endangerment conviction. His license was suspended for three months.
Not good enough.
The saddest part of this is that the child sees the police take daddy away and could carry that association into adulthood. Hopefully the child will have gotten through their first 20 or so years without the association becoming criminal acts of revenge or hate. Please teach the child involved that the police do what they have to keep him (the child) and the community from getting hurt or worse. DON’T lie to the child or say how horrible their dad is because to them he is Superman. All humans make boo boos and sometimes lessons are hard and today daddy is learning just that.
Good grief–this is your takeaway statement about this event?? That the four year old child is such a fragile, hot-house orchid that his character may well be permanently harmed by having his father arrested?? No wonder society treats people these days as if they are not responsible for their actions. You are already saying this four year old will have a reason to “blame” someone else when they are in their twenties for something that happened when they were four. Good grief.
Well said…
Unfortunately, when children are in (or close to) their formative years these events DO change lives.
Harry–if you want to buy into all that touchy-feelie bs, be my guest. I don’t know a single person who makes it to adulthood without heartbreak, some sort of trauma, the death of a loved one, be it a parent, sibling, grandparent, friend, family pet, etc. But life does go on. But when we have schools canceling classes and bringing in “trauma advisors” and “grief counselors,” we are in effect telling young people that their lives need to come to a complete standstill in the face of the vicissitudes of life. We are creating emotional cripples. This four year old, even if he did see Dad arrested, does not need to end up an emotional basket case unless we keep telling him he should be. Oh, the humanity, oh, the PTSD…
I’ve raised over 100 foster children, I’ve seen first hand what trauma can do. Actually it isn’t “touchy-feely at all, as there is not a damn thing you can do about it. hugs, talking, and therapy doesn’t help.
BTW there is a HUGE difference between losing a loved one, parent, sibling, grandparent, friend, family pet, etc and having your father arrested. During the first trauma you get support for the second you get people to telling you your family is sh1t and probably you are too.
Scientific studies have shown that preschool children who suffer trauma display the results of that trauma during adolescence. If you choose to believe that is the stuff of legend so-be-it.
Dear Harry–Obviously you have never witnessed the length, extreme lengths, I might add, that law enforcement officers go through to make sure kids are NOT exposed to seeing a parent or loved one placed in handcuffs. I challenge you to find a single person ever arrested here in Bangor for OUI where their children in the vehicle were ever told their parents were crap and so were they.
Your statement, that you are a foster parent, says it all. Yet another person who benefits financially from the system where kids are treated like shrinking violets and need to have someone to watch over them.
All of our parents, or grandparents, or even ourselves if we are old enough had relatives who lived through the Great Depression without the means to feed themselves or their families. You want to talk about feeling like sh1t? And yet, out of thefamilies of the Great Depression came the men and women of the Greatest Generation who fought in WWII.
Like I said, if you teach kids they should suffer from PTSD, trauma, depression, low self-esteem, etc., that’s what you will get.
My comment had NOTHING what so ever to do with law enforcement. I fully support the arrest and detention of this man. That was not my point. Sorry you didn’t get that.
I like that part about me profiting from the system (by being a foster parent). Sure wish you would show me the money. When I took in children, we got $160 a month, plus a $25 clothing allowance paid quarterly. In order to get the next month’s payment, we had to turn in receipts showing what we did with the previous month’s money. We were allowed “leeway” (meaning no receipts required) for $30 which we used for things like school sports programs, a movie once in awhile, and a meal out. My “foster children” were mostly teenagers who had been in multiple homes. Some had been physically abused to a degree where evidence of that abuse would stay with them through their lives. Broken ribs, cracked skulls, and cigarette burns on their genitalia.
One youngster who stayed with me for four years had a father who would trade him to pedophiles for a bottle of Southern Comfort. When digging deeper, the social service agency learned that the father was only doing the exact same thing which had been done to him.
It is obvious to me that this response is a waste of time, because you don’t have a clue as to what you are talking about.
Harry, then you must have been parenting before Christ was born. Foster parents for teens, over five years ago, received payments of over $500/month per child, with a rate of almost double that ($900/month) for teens with special needs. How many foster children did you have in your home at any given time? Two, three, four? Three teen kids with mild special needs would be $2700/month, and if the kids were in school, boy, that’s great money here in Maine for a part-time job. Our family fostered as well, so I KNOW what I am talking about.
I LOVE how liberals all talk about how tough everybody has it, and all we have to do is throw money at the problem.
This little four year old’s only problem will be if he is surrounded by people like you who continually tell him he needed to be traumatized because his father got arrested. Oh, yeah, I forgot, you also claimed to know the police told him his father and he were pieces of crap.
Get a grip, Harry, and grow up.
I don’t need your approval, nor your belief. The number of untrue “assumptions” in your writing is truly breathtaking. Where did you get the idea that I am “liberal?”
I also defy you to cut and paste where I “claimed to know the police told him his father and he were pieces of crap.” You can’t because I never said that.
Since you’ve edited your previous responses, including one where you called me a fag, and took out the reference to where the officers “probably called his dad, and him, a piece of sh1t” you make that kinda hard to do…
What I said is:
“BTW there is a HUGE difference between losing a loved one, parent,
sibling, grandparent, friend, family pet, etc and having your father
arrested. During the first trauma you get support for the second you
get people to telling you your family is sh1t and probably you are too.”
It’s still there and unedited.
With absolutely NOTHING about law enforcement personnel.
Thank you for proving my point.
What’s the basis of suspending part of the sentence? This klown was THREE TIMES the legal limit which puts his blood alcohol level at .24. This wasn’t just a small oops, it was a choice…as was bringing his child with him.
What would you want him to do?
Drive to the Booze Store and leave the kid at Home Alone?
u probaly are an idot like him!
Suspension of his license for 5 months, really? It should have been a lot longer. How about forever. He endangered a 4 year old with his stupidity. At 3 times the leagle limit, he was a driving time bomb. And Maine claims to have some of the strictest oui laws on the books……right.
When I was a teenager, a 18-year-old acquaintance was drag-racing on Route 287 outside of New York City. He lost control of his full-size Pontiac Bonneville crossed the center Island, and hit a Ford Falcon Station wagon head-on. The impact of the crash drove the steering column through the chest of the Falcon’s driver, his six year old son was jammed under the dashboard so deep it took the cops and tow truck people six hours to get him out. the wife somehow survived this crash, but her face hit the windshield, and she had 417 stitches to put it back together. the other four children in the back seat all sustained serous injury.
The gas tank from the Pontiac broke loose and bounced along the highway until it a Chevrolet driven by an off-duty Pleasantville policeman. The resulting fire gave him second degree burns over 50% of his body. He remained in the hospital for almost a month.
The family in the Station wagon had ongoing issues as long as I knew them. (I moved from the area two years later but kept in contact for 15 years after that.) The youngest child who was pulled from under the dashboard was institutionalized because he would burst in to violent tantrums without advance notice. he had been a mild pleasant child before the accident.
The young man driving the Pontiac suffered a dislocated ankle, and some cuts and abrasions. He went to court, and walked out with a $1,500 fine, and a six month license suspension (the maximum license suspension in New York at the time). The judge said he was young and appeared very sorry.
Hold on. Don’t go away, the story is not over.
FOUR MONTHS LATER the same “sorry” young man had another “accident” He was returning from an uncle’s bar in Union New Jersey, While driving up the Palisades Parkway he side swiped a woman’s car, She lost control, ran off the road and hit a tree killing her instantly. The police failed to have the young man’s blood tested for alcohol, although bystanders at the scene claimed he was staggering, and smelled of liquor. Because the accident occurred in New Jersey he was given a ticket for driving without a license, and released. When New York found out about the Jersey accident, they rearrested him for driving against the conditions the court had set. They suspended his license for an additional six months, and gave him another $500 fine.
Although this young man lived fewer than five city blocks from his place of employment (a restaurant owned by another uncle) he applied for a hardship license and received it. I saw him driving many times after that for the year his license was suspended. I even saw him at the drive-in movie with a girl in his father’s Cadillac.
I’ve always wondered why in no State is there a provision for permanent revocation of a driver’s license UNLESS you happen to be over 70.
OMG!What the hell is wrong with this picture?I can’t believe he only got months,not yrs!I bet he will be out and doing it again in no time,why not he only recieved a slap on the wrist and maybe this time he will kill a child or someone eles ……………