Couple awakens to SUV in pool

Bill Haggerty, who lives in the house with his wife and two kids, said, "It looks like she actually caught air, because the front half of the car made it across the pool."

PORT RICHEY -- The crash outside their bedroom sprang Bill and Laura Haggerty instantly out of their bed Wednesday night.

Laura called 911. Bill went outside to see what happened.

He found an SUV with its back end submerged in his swimming pool. The driver, Nicole Renee Carlin, 36, left, who appeared unharmed, opened her door and promptly fell into the water.

Haggerty helped the woman out and asked if she was okay. She stank of alcohol, he said, and had a glazed look in her eyes.

And after just a moment, she wanted to leave.

"I said, 'ma'am, you can’t leave, your truck is in my pool,'" Haggerty, 39, said. "She said, 'I can get it out!'"

But then she got up and bolted through the sliding glass doors into Haggerty's house on Water Oak Drive, he said.

Haggerty's 10-year-old daughter had awakened. His son, 8, didn't stir.

Haggerty, in his pajamas with no shoes on, followed the woman out of the house but gave up the chase when he saw her crawling through some hedges. Sirens were wailing.

"To be honest, I didn’t think she was going to get very far," Haggerty said.

The Florida Highway Patrol arrested Carlin after she was spotted trying to enter another house on a nearby street, a report said.

She was charged with trespassing, DUI, leaving the scene of an accident and DUI with property damage. She is being held today in the Pasco County jail in Land O'Lakes in lieu of $1,500 bail.

She told a trooper she didn't know where she had been drinking but "she had way too many," the report says.

Haggerty, who moved his family to Port Richey from Boca Raton in July, said it scares him to think about such a thing happening on a Saturday afternoon when his kids could be in the pool.

He said he's glad no one was hurt, including Carlin.

Molly Moorhead, Times staff writer