Santa Barbara – Santa Barbara’s Lower Westside neighborhood can be a difficult area to navigate by car, even when cold sober during daylight, as it is laced with narrow early-20th Century lanes and avenues, where passing another car and maneuvering around legally parked cars at curbside can be a challenge.
Imagine then, the difficulty of driving down those narrow, congested streets in the dark of night while inebriated at twice the legal blood alcohol. Such appears to have been the case on the night of March 31st when Brenda C. Jauregui-Salinas, a 21-year old resident of Goleta, slammed her gray Dodge Charger into an oncoming Jeep Cherokee being driven by a 36-year old Santa Barbara man.
According to Santa Barbara Police Department Public Information Officer Sgt. Riley Harwood, “she drifted into the wrong side of the roadway”, made full contact with the Jeep, and then promptly alighted from her vehicle and “fled on foot”. She was making a clean getaway until she was apprehended just two blocks distant from the accident site.
SBPD officers responding to the scene located a pair of witnesses to the accident who made a positive identification of Jauregui-Salinas as the driver of the errant Dodge. In the course of their standard DUI investigation, the 21-year old woman rang the bell on the breathalyzer with a reading double the legal limit, at .16% blood alcohol level.
Jauregui-Salinas was then transported to Santa Barbara County Jail where she was booked on charges of DUI with her bail set at $5000.
Jauregui-Salinas, who turned 21 in January, was arrested on May 17 of last year when she was 20 for being a minor in possession of alcohol, and entering and remaining in an establishment that sells alcoholic beverages as a minor. According to a police report, she was arrested at an event in the Casa De La Raza cultural center on Montecito Street in Santa Barbara at 11 pm that Saturday night. No further details of that incident were available.
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