A female drunk driver who was arrested after crashing through a garden gate asked police officers if they would kidnap her ‘like Sarah Everard’.
Annabel Lewis kicked, spat and shouted at police who attended the scene of her accident, pleading with them by saying: ‘Please don’t kill me, officer,’ a court heard.
The 34-year-old driver was found to be nearly three times over the drink-drive limit when she crashed her silver Volkswagen Polo in Southampton last year.
Lewis, who was believed to have an ‘inbuilt dislike of the police’, was ‘adamant’ she had not touched alcohol and crashed in an attempt to ‘dodge a deer or a badger’.
But after admitting five charges of assaulting an emergency worker and three charges of causing racially aggravated intentional intimidation, alarm or distress, she has now been given an eight-month suspended sentence.
Prosecutor Grave McConnell told Southampton Crown Court that the incident took place in the early hours of August 31.
She told onlookers she had crashed to avoid a deer or badger, but she was seen slurring words and a bottle of Baileys was found in her car, it was heard.
Police attended but she began her barrage of insults, swearing at them and saying ‘please don’t kill me, officer’ before asking if they wanted to ‘kidnap me like Sarah Everard’.
Sarah Everard, 33, disappeared on the evening of March 3, 2021, and her body was not found until a week later.
In September 2021, Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens was given a life sentence for Ms Everard’s murder, and he was also recently found guilty of three charges of indecent exposure that occurred previously.
Couzens used Covid powers to falsely arrest Ms Everard as she walked home from a friend’s house in Clapham. He then committed crimes so heinous that they shocked the nation and undermined confidence in the police.
In a roadside test, Lewis was found to be almost three times the drink-driving limit.
During the assault, she repeatedly shouted “Allah,” told an officer they looked like a rapist and began threatening them with physical violence.
She was stopped and placed in a car but then started kicking out, getting two officers punched before she was put in handcuffs and left to calm down.
This did not work as she later kicked an officer ‘hard enough to force him to step back’ before spitting at another member of the force at Southampton Central Police Station.
She also threw her shoe and an ankle bracelet at officers during a house search.
Ms McConell told the court this was an ‘ongoing incident’ which ‘placed a number of police officers present in distress’.
Representing Lewis, Stephen Tricker said she felt she was wrongly accused of drunk driving.
“She is adamant that she had not been drinking before the collision,” he said.
Referring to the fact that she had stayed out of trouble for more than a decade, he added that there was “no justification for the way she treated those officers” but that she had “demonstrated that she could stay out of trouble.”
Sentencing her for the ‘very unpleasant’ incident, Judge Peter Henry said: ‘You have a terrible record.
“You clearly have a built-in distaste for the police.
“Even if you have mental health issues, that doesn’t justify what happened.”
Lewis was given an eight-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, with 25 rehabilitation days and 150 hours of unpaid work.
She was ordered to pay £550 in compensation.