Minor Drinker Facing Music Without Pals
No matter what happens today in court, one verdict is already in: Adam Wyble needs to associate with a better crowd.
The role models this 19-year-old Moses Lake-area resident has hung around haven’t been a great influence.
They invited Wyble to their Christmas functions last Dec. 13.
Then they turned a blind eye while the underage lad drank himself stupid.
The worst part is that Wyble’s drinking buddies are cops.
The young man’s foolish behavior led to his bombing down a Grant County highway the morning after attending two yuletide police parties.
A state trooper saw him buzzing by and turned on his flashers. Wyble now faces charges of reckless driving and being a minor in possession.
His trip to jail cost him his job as a 911 dispatcher for the Multi Agency Communications Center. He says he was forced to resign on Dec. 17. Wyble believes this stain on his driving record essentially ends his quest to become a commercial pilot.
“He did consume alcohol. He’s guilty as hell,” says Gary Wilson, a retired Washington State Patrol officer who is also Wyble’s stepfather. “But what about the cops who are over 21 years of age and sold him the tickets to buy it?”
Unfortunately, my calls to a couple of these police employees went unreturned. Good thing there is plenty of information in court documents already filed.
Wyble appears in District Court this morning in Moses Lake. Deputy Prosecutor Carole Highland wants to combine the driving citation with the MIP charge, which was filed two weeks after the traffic stop.
Gloria Porter, a Spokane attorney representing Wyble on behalf of Moses Lake-based Garth Dano & Associates, opposes this attempt to enjoin the two actions for Wyble’s June trial.
She’d like the alcohol side of this case to go away. “It’s a speeding ticket to me,” says Porter.
It’s a good deal more than that.
Wyble admits his Acura Integra was doing 100-plus mph when he was stopped. The trooper claims he clocked the kid at 126. If that ain’t reckless driving, nothing is.
The minor in possession charge seems pretty valid, too.
The first Christmas wingding he attended took place in a Moses Lake police officer’s home. In his District Court declaration, Wyble admits he started drinking, but only “after the third or fourth offer.”
He guzzled more suds later at the Moses Lake Senior Center, site of the Grant, Adams and Lincoln Counties Law Enforcement Ball. A sheriff’s deputy sold him drink tickets, he states, and “during the evening other police officers were bringing me alcoholic beverages.”
A police dispatcher took the besotted Wyble to her home to sleep it off. He was still slightly under the influence when he woke up and headed home.
Wyble is a good kid who should have had better sense. But what smells like dead skunks in an outhouse is that no cops are sharing in Adam’s pain.
Let a bar serve a minor alcohol - willfully or innocently - and it can cost an owner his liquor license.
But after an in-house investigation, only two noncommissioned city police employees received slight reprimands for Wyble’s drinking.
The real cops have circled their prowl cars. According to prosecutor Highland, who attended the ball, none of the revelers knew Wyble was a minor.
That’s hard to swallow. Wyble says plenty of Moses Lake officers knew him. He went on police ride-alongs and even enjoyed a few high-speed pursuits. Maybe that’s where he learned to put the pedal to the metal.
When he took the dispatcher job last June, he says, “everybody made fun of me because of my age.”
Surely some of these bold defenders of the law saw him drinking and knew he was under age. Wyble is a very young-looking 19, says his lawyer. “He’s got red hair, freckles and looks like Opie Taylor.”
So where are his role models now?
“Adam Wyble? They never heard of him,” says Wyble’s angry stepfather of his cowardly badge brothers. “You’ll probably be hard pressed to find a cop now who was even at the party.”
, DataTimes