Driver Really Picked a Bad Place to Pull Off the Road

An easy arrest.

It was 3 a.m. Wednesday and two California Highway Patrol officers were ready to call it a night, when a car approached with its high beams burning.

The car passed without flicking off its brights, so Officer Jim Nellis thought, “What the heck. Let’s ticket him.”

Nellis and his partner, Officer A. Rieve, swung their car around and started to tail the 1992 Buick Regal with the Alamo Rental Car license plate frame.

Before Nellis flipped on the patrol car’s flashing lights, the Buick pulled quickly into a driveway and stopped. Not sure what to make of such complete and abrupt compliance, Nellis and Rieve approached the car cautiously. Rieve walked up to the man driving. Nellis went to the woman passenger.

The officers started in with the typical questions. Then they both noticed something wrong.

It wasn’t so much the driver’s nervous twitch, his dilated pupils, or the rambling, almost manic flights of speech that a simple question elicited.

It was more the big plastic bag of white powder on the car console, Nellis said. It looked an awful lot like cocaine.

“What’s that you got there?” Rieve asked the driver, William Earl Center, 35, of Honolulu.

Suddenly, Center wasn’t so talkative.

The passenger, Misty Pedelaborde, 22, of Sonoma, who had been quiet up to that point, was a little more responsive.

“Can I ask what you’ve got in your handbag?” Nellis asked.

Pedelaborde was quoted as saying, “travel money.”

She opened her purse and revealed four fat bundles of bills: $100s, $50s, $20s and $10s.

It added up to $19,718, CHP spokesman Mark Gregg said. And the couple had indeed been traveling--from Detroit to Los Angeles to Logan Heights, where they allegedly purchased the cocaine, to the 4900 block of Pacific Highway, where their car was now parked, Gregg said.

The substance turned out to be cocaine, 17 grams of it, valued at $20,000, Gregg said.

Center was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of a controlled substance. He and Pedelaborde were also booked on suspicion of transporting, possessing and intending to distribute a controlled substance, Gregg said.

Once the officers realized that they had drug trafficking suspects on their hands, they didn’t have to go far. Instead of calling in the arrest, they just yelled across the parking lot.

Turned out Center had parked in front of CHP headquarters, about 10 yards shy of the front door.

“The guy was a little out of it,” Nellis said. “He had no idea where he was.”