Cop found intoxicated after allegedly fleeing a crash involving family’s vehicles

According to reporter Carissa Woytach in The Chronicle-Telegram, the trouble started just before 11 p.m. on April 17 in Lorain, Ohio.

Sgt. Eric Rivera of the Lorain Police Department was off duty, driving his marked 2020 Dodge Charger cruiser.

Woytach reports that Rivera was heading southwest on West Ninth Street near Long Avenue when he allegedly went left of center.

The crash report says he hit a curb, drove through an empty lot, and then plowed into two parked vehicles, a burn barrel, and a shed.

Those vehicles belonged to Sharon Parsons and her son, who were just at home minding their business.

The crash left their cars “heavily damaged,” Woytach writes.

Instead of staying at the scene, the report says Rivera backed up, turned around, and drove back through the empty lot and onto West Ninth toward Lexington Avenue.

That decision is at the heart of what comes next.

Parsons later told Woytach she woke up to what she thought were gunshots and sirens.

When she stepped outside, neighbors told her a police cruiser had just smashed into her silver 2004 Honda Civic, her son’s 1996 Honda Accord, and then the shed.

Witnesses Say It Was A Police Cruiser – Officers Say “No”

Civil rights attorney John Bryan, on his YouTube channel The Civil Rights Lawyer, walks viewers through the bodycam footage from that night.

He says what happened to Parsons is basically the nightmare version of calling the police on the police.

Bryan explains that when officers first arrived, neighbors tried to tell them it was a marked Lorain police car that caused the damage.

One witness on camera insists she saw “a silver car with police on the side of it.”

Instead of taking that seriously, the responding officer pushes back.

“This was not from a police car. I’ll tell you that right now,” the officer tells them.

The witness keeps repeating that she knows what a Lorain police cruiser looks like.

At one point, she bluntly says, “I feel like you don’t believe me,” and tells the officer, “You’re just going to protect your own no matter what.”

From Bryan’s perspective as a civil rights lawyer, that moment is critical.

He points out that rather than treating the residents as victims, the officer appears more focused on defending the department’s image.

Woytach’s reporting backs up the neighbors’ version in a different way.

Parsons told her she later found pieces of the cruiser in the empty field, including fragments with Lorain Police decals, and turned them over as evidence.

That means the people on the scene were right from the start.

They saw a police car do the damage, and the physical debris on the ground backed them up.

Investigators Later Find The Officer Drunk

In her article, Carissa Woytach notes that alcohol is listed as a suspected factor in the crash report.

But Deputy Chief Mike Failing told her a blood alcohol test “was not completed due to a lapse in time” between the crash and when officers spoke with Rivera.

That sounds, at first, like the department just couldn’t prove he was intoxicated at the time of the wreck.

But John Bryan obtained internal documents that fill in more of the picture.

Bryan says Rivera left the scene and drove home after the crash.

He then contacted his command staff, and patrol supervisors later came to his residence and saw “heavy front-end damage” on the city vehicle.

According to Bryan, Rivera was transported to Mercy Hospital for an occupational health screening.

There, he says, two breath tests were recorded: 0.138 and 0.131.

As a former DUI prosecutor, Bryan calls that “drunk drunk drunk.”

He adds that in Rivera’s written statement, the sergeant claimed he drank “several alcoholic beverages” after getting home but before officers arrived.

That’s a classic move defense lawyers see all the time.

If you can’t avoid the alcohol, you at least try to blur the timeline so no one can say for sure what your BAC was when you were behind the wheel.

The difference here, as Bryan points out, is that this tactic actually seems to have worked for a police sergeant.

For a regular person, he argues, fleeing a crash and later blowing over 0.13 would almost certainly mean DUI charges and a hit-and-run case.

Internal Discipline – But No Firing

On the administrative side, Woytach reports that Sgt. Rivera was placed on paid administrative leave and that an internal investigation was opened through the Office of Professional Standards.

Failing confirmed to her that Rivera was off duty at the time of the crash.

She writes that Rivera was charged in Lorain Municipal Court with failure to control and failure to stop after an accident, both misdemeanors.

Those are relatively minor charges for plowing a cruiser through two cars and a shed.

John Bryan goes further, citing the internal affairs findings.

He says investigators sustained violations against Rivera for gross misconduct, ethics and professional behavior, vehicle use, and care of property.

So what was the punishment?

According to Bryan, the department did not fire Rivera.

Instead, he says, leadership demoted him from sergeant to patrol officer and ordered him to pay $15,691 in restitution for the damage.

Bryan questions who that restitution is really for – suggesting it’s likely to cover damage to the city’s cruiser, not necessarily the family’s destroyed cars and shed.

Meanwhile, Sharon Parsons told Woytach she’s stuck chasing the city’s insurance and the Traffic Bureau.

She said a call to the city’s insurance revealed there was “no incident” in their system at first, and she’s had “little luck” getting anyone to respond.

For her, this isn’t a policy debate – it’s her only transportation and her son’s car sitting wrecked outside the house.

She told The Chronicle, “I was sick to my stomach when I saw it… unbelievable was all I could say.”

Bodycams, Muted Mics, And A Trust Problem

What really bothers John Bryan isn’t just the crash itself.

It’s how the responding officers treated the victims and their own body cameras.

He shows footage of a female officer repeatedly dismissing eyewitness accounts.

She even calls the witness a “nuisance” and says she doesn’t believe her story about a Lorain cruiser being involved.

Then, Bryan points out moments where the officer mutes her body-worn camera while speaking with a supervisor or someone on the phone.

To him, that’s not just bad optics – it’s destroying evidence the public has a right to hear.

Bryan says you, the viewer, will never know what was said in those muted conversations.

He argues that this looks like classic circling the wagons to protect a colleague, not an honest search for the truth.

From a transparency standpoint, that’s devastating.

Bodycams were sold to the public as tools to hold police accountable and clear up disputed events.

But if they can simply be muted at key moments – especially when fellow officers are under suspicion – then they start to feel more like a shield than a window.

That perception alone can burn a lot of community trust, even among people who support the police.

Why This Case Feels Like A Double Standard

Taken together, Carissa Woytach’s local reporting and John Bryan’s legal analysis paint a picture that’s hard to ignore.

An off-duty sergeant allegedly crashes a city cruiser into a family’s vehicles and their shed, flees the scene, and later blows over 0.13 on a breath test.

Witnesses say they saw a marked Lorain police car hit the cars and drive off with lights activated.

A neighbor tells officers to their faces that they’re refusing to believe what she saw “with my own two eyes.”

Instead of immediate arrest, there’s time to go home, drink more, and blur the evidence.

Instead of termination, there’s a demotion and a restitution order.

Meanwhile, the family whose property was wrecked is left navigating insurance calls, unanswered phone messages, and the feeling that if this had been anyone else behind the wheel, the outcome would look very different.

To be fair, internal discipline and restitution are better than nothing.

But it’s also fair to say that for many citizens, this doesn’t feel like equal justice under the law.

When police departments ask for public trust, cases like this make that request harder to honor.

If ordinary people would be arrested, charged, and likely convicted for the same behavior, then “protecting and serving” has to apply inward too – not just outward.

At the end of the day, a family in Lorain is still staring at wrecked cars and a damaged shed.

They aren’t the ones who went to a party, drove drunk, and fled a crash.

Yet they’re the ones living with the consequences while the officer who hit them still wears a badge.

And that, more than anything, is why this story hits such a nerve.

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The article Cop found intoxicated after allegedly fleeing a crash involving family’s vehicles first appeared on Survival World.