WEST MONTGOMERY COUNTY- A suspected drunk driver got a lesson in judging a book by its cover in the early hours of Saturday, after he crashed his pickup through the wall of 67-year-old Stanton Abbott’s Lake Conroe area home.
The neighborhood off of Hwy 105 is filled with narrow roads and sharp blind curves, but the crash was not caused by any of those factors. Chicksaw Road dead-ends into Comanche Road in front of the modest wood frame home Abbott shares with his mother, Mildred Evans. Saturday was Evans’ 84th birthday, and could easily have been her last.
Abbott and Evans were sleeping when the full size extended cab Ford pickup crashed straight into Evans’ bedroom, trapping her inside.
“All of a sudden I’m laying on the floor, and I thought I heard a horn honking and I felt a jolt and I figured that probably somebody had run into the side of the house,” Abbott said. “With all the drunks we got running up and down this road up here Saturday night, this is a raceway.”
When Abbott got up from the floor, he went outside and saw the white pickup embedded in his mother’s room beneath a large American flag hung there for Memorial Day. Abbott confronted the suspect, who he said kept asking, “What’d I do? What’d I do?”
Believing the driver was drunk, Abbott said he told the man not to move, and then he went back inside the house to try and reach his mother. He then realized just how extensive the damage was, when he was unable to get into her room or even find out if she survived.
Abbott stepped outside again and the driver was “stumbling around the other side of his truck.” Abbott went back inside and soon heard the suspect “beating on the side or front of the house trying to get in.”
“That’s when I told 911 he was trying to break in, to get me some help out here, I needed some help,” Abbott said.
But the small gray haired man did not sit and wait for police and firefighters to rescue him and Evans.
“My mother was trapped and I couldn’t get in to see if she was all right, and she’s 84 and the (911 call taker) kept wanting me to stay on (the phone) and I told her I couldn’t because the guy was trying to break in and I had to get my pistol,” Abbott said. “I got the pistol and I confronted him, and he was walking toward me and I told him to lay his damn butt on that concrete right there, chest down ,fold his hands behind his head and he better not move because he probably just killed my mother and I was fixing to shoot his (expletive).”
As the suspect complied with Abbott’s demands, he continued to ask what he had done and Abbott told him he hit the side of Abbott’s house and probably killed his mother. He claims the suspect responded by saying, “Well, I don’t care.”
Abbott told them man he would shoot if the man moved. The man moved, but said he would not shoot because he could smell alcohol and the man was obviously intoxicated.
“About that time he said ‘I don’t care shoot me’ and he rose up, broke and run,” Abbott said.
As the suspect fled, Abbott saw a neighbor and yelled for him to stop the suspect. The neighbor caught up with the suspect, but he escaped by running through an empty lot and jumping into the lake. Abbott thinks the man planned to swim across the lake to Hwy 105.
The suspect was caught and in police custody a short time later, but was taken to the hospital instead of jail. Officials with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said the suspect had a concussion and would be arrested upon his release.
Amazingly, Mildred Evans suffered only minor injuries.
“All’s well that ends well, I guess,” Abbott said.
The suspect’s personal information and mug shot will be posted following his arrest.
