EXCLUSIVE: Ninety days in residential treatment kept an Allendale woman convicted twice before for drunk driving out of prison today for having her two young children in the car when she ran a red light and then registered four times the legal limit on a breath test.
Prosecutors said the children — one of them 5 years old and the other 18 months — were in the vehicle when an officer pulled over Nancy Buchanan last June in Ho-Ho-Kus.
Buchanan, a native of Seoul, Korea who also is known as Nancy Kronemann (above, left), failed several sobriety tests, then “blew a .31,” Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Dion Findley told Superior Court Judge James J. Guida at a sentencing hearing in Hackensack today.
In response to defense attorney Tamra Katcher’s contention that Buchanan is “a productive member of society,” Findley said: “I think she will write or say anything that suits her interests.
Clik here to view.
Superior Court Judge James J. Guida
(STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter)
“She told the officer she drank a couple of glasses of wine and didn’t have anything to eat all day,” Findley added. “It’s her third DWI, and she had her two young children in the car.”
“Point 31 borders on death by intoxication,” the judge told Buchanan. “People have died with .31 in their systems.
“So certainly it’s more than a couple of glasses of wine.”
Guida also told Buchanan he considers her “a very high risk, given your prior record.”
However, he said he was sentencing her to five years’ probation because she confronted her alcohol addiction by completing a 90-day inpatient rehabilitation program.
“If you violate probation you’ll be going to state prison, not the Bergen County Jail, do you understand that?” the judge told her.
In that case, he said, “someone else will have to take care of” her children.
STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter
