Woodbury Police Say Woman Charged with Felony DWI Faked Breath Tests

An Oakdale woman has been charged with felony drunken driving after Woodbury police say she faked breath tests at least three times.

Rita Dolores Illi, 40, is charged with first-degree driving while impaired, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison and a $14,000 fine.

According to the criminal complaint, a Woodbury police officer was inflating a tire on his squad car at about 1:30 a.m. Nov. 13 when he saw an SUV drive into the gas station parking lot, then continue into the parking lot of an adjacent strip mall.

The officer knew the businesses in the strip mall were closed, so he considered the SUV’s route “not a logical travel route,” according to the complaint.

The officer followed the SUV and found the driver parked along a curb behind a truck. He found Illi, the only person in the SUV, in the driver’s seat, and smelled a strong odor of alcohol coming from the vehicle.

Illi denied drinking and told the officer that nobody else had been drinking in her SUV or had spilled alcohol. The officer administered sobriety tests, but when he tried to administer a breath test, he was unable to get a sufficient sample because Illi “was puffing out her cheeks and making blowing sounds, but not actually blowing through the straw,” according to the complaint.

The officer tried repeatedly to get Illi to actually blow into the straw, but was unsuccessful, the complaint says. “When it appeared obvious that [Illi] was not going to comply,” the officer took a sample of the air around her mouth, which registered a .14 blood-alcohol content, above the legal limit of .08.

During a subsequent search of Illi’s SUV, the officer found an open vodka bottle under the driver’s seat.

Illi was taken to the Washington County Jail, where twice more she pretended to blow into the breath-test machine by puffing out her cheeks and making blowing sounds, according to the complaint.

Illi, who has three previous DWI convictions on her criminal record, has been released on a $20,000 bond and is scheduled to make an initial appearance on the latest charge Dec. 12 in Washington County District Court.