A Mississippi man was jailed with multiple driving offenses including a hit and run charge on Monday according to Polk County Police reports.
Richard Hoover Lambert, 51, of a Nesbit, Mississippi address near the Tennessee line and Memphis, was taken into custody on Monday around 9:30 a.m. after he was first spotted running a stop sign by a man concerned about him after he pulled into the convenience store at Coot’s Lake Road.
According to the report, police had been issued a Be On the Look Out (or B.O.L.O.) for the Dodge Ram truck in the area around Forsyth Lake Road after the driver later identified as Lambert was reported to have struck a parked unattended vehicle and was now in the ditch while heading toward the campgrounds.
According to police, they found the truck in the ditch while it was raining on Monday morning and despite police activating their blue lights, Lambert continued to rock his truck back and forth to get it out the ditch, spraying the patrol vehicle with mud and getting out across a field trying to get back onto Atlanta Highway.
At this point, police stopped the truck head on and made contact with Lambert and got him to shut off the truck.
Donned only in a t-shirt, boxers and a pair of flip flops, Lambert was reported to have fumbled in his glove box searching through paperwork to find his license, and was asked to step out of the truck. The arresting officer reported that Lambert seemed unstable, and when questioned about whether he’d been drinking anything reported to officers that he had previously “had an Ambien and a Fruit Punch.” He told the officer he woke up hungry after a 14 hour work day and went to the store before he was planning to head back to Rome.
The man who originally called police told officers that he watched as Lambert ran a stop sign traveling west on Forsyth Lake Road near Atlanta Highway, and almost wreck with another vehicle in the process. When the driver who spotted Lambert stopped at the same convenience store while on the phone with 911, he watched him at the beer coolers buy additional alcoholic beverages, try to get into a vehicle that wasn’t his and then once getting back into his own truck, back into a black Jeep parked in the same lot.
He ran the stop sign leaving the convenience store running across Highway 278 and then after heading back onto Forsyth Lake Road toward the campgrounds, made a wide U-Turn and almost strike a third vehicle and ultimately ended up in the ditch where police found him.
Lambert was taken to the Polk County Jail and charged with misdemeanor traffic violations including hit and run, two counts of failure to notify owner upon striking a fixed object, failure to maintain lane and reckless driving.
He remained in custody on a $2,950 bond at the time of this posting.
