Passed Out, Snoring In The Wrong House

Passed Out, Snoring In The Wrong House

May 8, 2007
By HILDA MUÑOZ And DANIEL P. JONES, Courant Staff Writers WEST HARTFORD -- A very drunk man who was walking home after arguing with his wife stumbled into a stranger's North Main Street house and passed out on an empty bed, where a stunned teenage girl found him snoring away when she got home at 12:30 a.m. Monday.

The girl alerted her sleeping parents, who called police after seeing that their daughter wasn't making it up.
"Sure enough, there's a guy in the bed. I noticed his pants were on the floor," the father said at the home Monday evening. "He was three sheets to the wind."

The intoxicated man, who had riffled through the kitchen cabinets and taken a glass of water upstairs, mumbled gibberish when the family, and then police, tried to wake him.

The man - not identified by police - was not arrested because the homeowners declined to press charges.

"I didn't think there was any evil intent on his part," said the homeowner, who didn't want to be identified.

His daughter, 18, said she didn't scream because she at first thought the stranger in her bed "was an old college friend of my dad."

The intruder, too intoxicated to make much sense, sat handcuffed in a police cruiser while police tried to figure out what had happened. A frantic woman out walking a dog provided the answer: The man in the cruiser was her husband. She was out looking for him because he hadn't come home after the couple argued in a West Hartford Center establishment Sunday night and went their separate ways.

The woman apologized profusely to the father. The man was so drunk he was taken to a hospital, police Lt. Stephen Estes said.

Det. Sgt. Tracey Gove said he didn't know of an incident like this ever happening in town.

He said police don't necessarily arrest people who are so drunk that they don't know what they are doing.

"If they're that bad, we try to get them some help," Gove said.

Police also wouldn't identify the woman, and did not release the address of the home the man entered.

But they said the intruder lives only a few blocks away.

"This house looked exactly like his house, so he walked in," Estes said.

"It's the modern-day Goldilocks story," the homeowner said of the uninvited guest.

Estes said the story has a moral: "Lock up your house."

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-ctwhddrunk0508.artmay08,0,2230754.story