Daniel Rushing had a rough pastry-related incident with law enforcement last December.
Two Orlando, Florida police offers mistook scraps of sugary glaze from a Krispy Kreme doughnut in the 64-year-old Rushing’s car for methamphetamine and then proceeded to arrest him and book him in the county jail (where he was strip searched) before he was finally released on $2,500 bail.
Rushing recounted his tale to the Orlando Sentinel, explaining that he regularly dropped off a friend for chemotherapy treatment on some weekends before picking up another elderly friend from a nearby complex with a 7-Eleven to give her a ride home. As part of his carpool ritual, he’d pick up a glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut and eat it while he was in the area.
But on the afternoon of December 11, Rushing was pulled over by a patrol car policing the 7-Eleven complex, ostensibly for not coming to a full stop while leaving the area and then speeding. A confused Rushing agreed to arresting officer Shelby Riggs-Hopkins’ request to search his car after she learned that he had a firearm permit and a gun, thinking he could barter his participation for getting out of a traffic violation ticket.
Instead, Riggs-Hopkins asserted that a “rock like” material on the floor of Rushing’s car was actually illegal drugs, and that she’d been patrolling the area because of reported narcotic sales. Rushing balked, saying it was simply dried up sugar from a glazed doughnut, but the officers said that two on-site tests revealed that it was actually a hard drug. (Later testing by a state lab proved that it was not.)
“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth,'” Flushing told the Sentinel.
Flushing now plans to sue the city, possibly next month, for damages. It’s still unclear why the field tests conducted by the Orlando police officers gave a false positive.
