Santa Barbara – Santa Barbara’s State Street is a well-known commercial, dining, and sightseeing magnet for the city’s thousands of weekend visitors, and is an upscale route where tourists can generally navigate the traffic crawl slowly and without fear of high-speed collision. Certainly on weekends, pedestrians walking down the street between the emerald-green foothills on the north side of town to Stearn’s Wharf at the shoreline on the south side generally make the trip faster than any motor vehicle on the traffic-clogged street.
But there are those few hours when traffic thins out and it’s possible to get your car up to enough speed to do some real damage. And while Santa Barbara is known as a city where “they roll up the sidewalks” after midnight, it’s also home to a number of watering holes, nightclubs, and bars with closing hours into the wee hours of the morning. It’s that combination of empty streets and flowing late-night libations that frequently gives drivers the opportunity to do something reckless.
Richardson’s rolled-over ride
Such seems to have been the case in the pre-dawn hours of November 16th, when, at 4:20 a.m. Nicol Sarah Richardson, a 23-year old Santa Barbara resident, was behind the wheel of her car. According to Santa Barbara Police Department Sgt. Brian Jensen, Richardson was involved in a rollover wreck which she managed to orchestrate all on her own and without the help or interference of any other drivers on the street. “She may have hit other cars, but I don’t think other occupied vehicles were involved,” Jensen reported to the media.
According to SBPD Public Information Officer Sgt. Riley Harwood, Richardson was transported to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries and was released the following day…only to be issued a citation for driving under the influence.
Photo: Courtesy Urban Hikers
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