Woman Flips Off Sheriff
And Also Had an Arrest Warrant
By Daniel Muniz

Everybody has experienced road rage at some stage of their life.

It is all around you on the streets and highways and there really is no way to escape the hot heads that cannot control their irascible temper. These sorts of unpleasant obnoxious people are immature and irresponsible. They make the roads unsafe and dangerous for everybody. And the worst offenders will even needlessly endanger the lives of innocent people when they throw their tantrums.

And road rage is not a recent phenomenon because it has been around since the advent of the first automobiles.

As a result, the worst possible thing that anyone with a short fuse can do is to childishly act on what annoys them when they are driving, especially if the issue is so trivial and inconsequential. Unfortunately for Mary Ann Sweeney, she had to learn the hard way and suffer through a number of unintended consequences because her actions.

Instead of keeping her cool, an obscenity that she gestured created an unstoppable chain of events that landed her and her spouse in the county jail.

While driving in Evansville Indiana with her husband, Jerry DeWayne Sweeney, Mary Ann was momentarily stopped behind a bus. She decided to pull her car around it and then continue driving. At the same time, an SUV was also driving down the opposite side of the same road.

As a courtesy, the vehicle slowed down and allowed Sweeney to pass the bus. The event in itself was trivial and unimportant except to Mary Ann.

Indignant and frustrated at the circumstance even though it was a courteous thing for the other driver to do, Sweeney in a fit of adolescent behavior “flipped off” the vehicle as she passed.

As luck would have it (or perhaps Murphy’s Law), the driver of that other vehicle happened to be Eric Williams who was the Vanderburgh County Chief Deputy. And to make this ill-fated situation even more embarrassing, his passenger was none other than the county sheriff, Brad Ellsworth.

Needless to say, Williams and Ellsworth pulled over Mary Ann and her husband.

While the police officers discussed the issue of road rage to the contrite and embarrassed couple, her driver’s license number and license plate were run through the computer.

Now to make this bad situation even worse, the check revealed that the car was illegally registered.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Both husband and wife also had outstanding warrants that they never bothered to clear up. And to compound the problem even further, marijuana was also found in their car.

Obviously, that was not Mary Ann’s day.

Instead of accepting the courtesy of being allowed to pass that bus and letting such a frivolous incident go by, husband and wife were now taken to the Vanderburgh County Jail.

But it is events like that this that make me think that there still is justice in the world.

I have seen plenty of enraged drivers on the highway who think that they own the road. These bullies are reckless and rude and oftentimes I just wished the police were around to observe them.

I have been upset plenty of times because of driving conditions or congested roads but I never take it out on whoever is on the highway.

And I have also felt like flipping people off, especially the obnoxious drivers, but I have refrained from doing so because it only makes the situation worse. And I think that I also have a good control on my anger.

But most importantly, I need to concentrate on the road instead of acting out on my aggression or behaving like an adolescent juvenile.

In this incident, it is my personal speculation that Mary Ann’s obscene gesture probably made the day of both cops.

Not only were they able to lecture the couple about road rage, it also became quite convenient to arrest two people with outstanding warrants. County sheriff Brad Ellsworth had this to say:

"I guess the moral of the story is, if you have warrants against you, you shouldn't flip off the police…"

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