A 36-year-old man has been sentenced for being extremely drunk and driving erratically before he was pulled over by police in Cottage Grove with his 2-year-old in the vehicle with him.
Matthew R. Quade, of Hastings, pleaded guilty to gross-misdemeanor drunken driving Wednesday and was sentenced in Washington County District Court in connection with the traffic stop on May 10 near the Hwy. 61 off-ramp and S. 80th Street.
Police saw him stray from his lane, follow other vehicles too closely and fail to obey an officer's emergency lights.
Inside his vehicle was his 2-year-old and three bottles of vodka. Quade was arrested and jailed. While there, he was given a preliminary breath test, and it measured his blood alcohol content at 0.38%. That's nearly five times the legal limit for driving in Minnesota.
Judge Douglas Meslow sentenced Quade to 365 days in jail but set aside all but 30 of those days, which Quade will satisfy by performing what's called sentence to serve. That often means being part of a supervised work crew or doing other community work involving physical labor. He also was put on supervised probation for the next four years.
The judge dismissed a gross-misdemeanor count of child endangerment.
