Sharon Toebelmann: Drink-driver blew .291 morning after Aus Day bender
A pissed-up Cranbourne patriot hit the grog hard on our national day But the celebrations soured the next day when she was breathalysed.
South East
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A plastered patriot who blew nearly six times the legal limit the morning after Australia Day has been hit with a big ban.
Sharon Maree Toebelmann spent the evening of the national celebration knocking back wines with her mates before registering a whopping .291 at 11am the following day.
The Cranbourne 48-year part-time supermarket worker lost her licence, and her car, on the spot.
Toebelmann pleaded guilty to drink-driving and driving while suspended at the online Dandenong Magistrates’ Court on Thursday.
This wasn’t her first exceed prescribed concentration of alcohol crime — she was also nabbed while three times over in 2014.
The court heard Toebelmann pulled into a booze bus site on Thompsons Rd in Cranbourne East on January 27 last year.
She recorded a reading of .291, was suspended there and then and had her vehicle impounded for 30 days.
Toebelmann told officers she had downed two bottles of wine with friends the night before.
Six months later on July 25 she was in the same Ford Falcon involved in the drink-drive when she crossed paths with police on Thompsons Rd in Lyndhurst.
The driver was flagged as having a suspended licence and although she was sober this time, she knew she shouldn’t have been driving but “had to go to work”.
Her defence lawyer said it was “a silly decision” to get behind the wheel after knocking back so much booze the evening before.
He said she did have treatment for her drinking after the 2014 incident but had relapsed due to significant health issues.
He said she believed she had been “getting on top” of her alcohol intake before the Australia Day situation occurred.
Magistrate Andrew Halse said he didn’t accept anyone had “got on top” of their drinking if they registered six times over the day after a session.
“There is a fundamental danger posed by someone at .291,” Mr Halse said.
“Fortunately for all concerned there were no injuries; the risk she posed was innumerably higher than someone at .05.”
He told her it was “astonishing” that someone with that extraordinarily high reading didn’t hurt someone, or herself.
“It is nothing other than pure luck you are in this court and not in the County facing a culpable driving charge, or at the coroner’s,” he said.
“You need to get assistance and treatment for your alcohol consumption.”
Toebelmann was given a 12-month community corrections order with 50 hours of unpaid work and disqualified from driving for 48 months, backdated to January last year.
