MAITLAND, Fla. – A Florida Highway Patrol trooper was on his way home early Sunday morning when he spotted a wrong-way driver on State Road 414 in Maitland.
Patrol car dashboard camera video shows the trooper, on the correct side of the road with lights flashing and sirens blaring, ordering the driver of the white Mercedes on the other side of the barrier to “pull to the right!”
“You are driving the wrong direction!” the trooper warned over his PA system.
The Mercedes kept moving at full speed and oncoming traffic kept coming right at him.
Several more cars went by thankfully missing the wrong-way driver. One of those drivers in the cars that went by was an Altamonte Springs officer.
The officer turned around and started following the Mercedes, also the wrong way.
This stopped the driver of the white Mercedes.
Lt. Kim Montes of the Florida Highway Patrol said the driver was drunk and hours later blew a .156 blood-alcohol level, almost twice the legal limit.
“It is scary to know he went for five miles, a trooper trying to get alongside him trying to get him stopped,” Montes said. “He was impaired, he blew a .15 a couple of hours later, and miraculously we didn’t have somebody struck in a head-on collision and be killed.”
Montes said the driver of the Mercedes, Howard Galloway of Apopka, claimed he was just following his GPS and turned around on the highway to go the wrong way.
Galloway went to jail, charged with drunk driving and driving the wrong way.
Usually, we only hear about wrong-way drivers when they crash and hurt someone, but Montes said that rarely happens compared to how many times drivers get on the highway going the wrong way - every day and every night, most often on weekends.
How do troopers know?
Because they get instant text messages and picture alerts on their phones, within seconds of the driver entering the highway in the wrong direction from the wrong-way detection system on all Expressway Authority roadways. News 6 first told you about it when it was installed in 2016.
Usually, the driver sees the flashing wrong-way lights and turns around.
“Some days I get multiple alerts,” Montes said. “Sometimes I get them all through the night, the weekend, most of them are at night and on the weekend, all the time. I think the most I’ve gotten one day is that 20.”
Dispatchers also get alerts immediately and automatically drivers on the road get a warning on overhead signs.
It usually ends well, like it did this weekend.
If a driver doesn’t turn around, police are alerted so quickly by the wrong-way detection system that the closest law enforcement officer can begin to catch up with the wrong-way driver in seconds and stop them.
The driver of the Mercedes turned around in the middle of the highway, Montes said he never triggered that wrong-way detection system.
“I think law enforcement did not realize how many drivers enter a ramp system on a toll road the wrong way because we never had documentation of it,” Montes said.
“We see so many people enter this ramp, and one of two things happen, either they continue through the toll booth oblivious to the blinking light, flashing warnings, everything, or they right themselves and make a U-turn and get off that ramp go the right way. Most of the time they do right themselves. That obnoxious warning system gets their attention and they do right themselves before ever going up the ramp completely the wrong way. So we think this is a hugely successful system in the best technology we’ve seen to implement traffic safety.”