This Staten Islander says riding the ferry while intoxicated is no crime.
A woman filed suit yesterday over claims she was falsely arrested while drunkenly waiting at the Staten Island Ferry’s Whitehall Terminal.
Chloe Sowers’ Manhattan federal court suit demands unspecified damages from the city and New York Downtown Hospital, where she says she was put in a straitjacket, sedated and held overnight after refusing treatment.
According to her suit, the 37-year-old Web-site developer “was intoxicated, but functioning and in control of her faculties” after downing four vodka martinis at a Dec. 8 party thrown by Absolut Vodka.
There were no open seats in the waiting area when Sowers got to the terminal at around midnight, so she was sitting near the entrance and “hydrating with coconut water” when a cop approached “to ask if she was OK.”
After Sowers said she was, the cop allegedly “insisted that she had to go to the hospital” and called EMS, here suit says.
“Being tipsy in public is not illegal in the state of New York, and being intoxicated is not a reason to go to the hospital,” Sowers’ suit says.
Her court papers say Sowers, 5-foot-8 and 148 pounds, is “not an anorexic waif” and was “capable of taking care of herself.”
When she refused to go to the hospital, Sowers says, she was handcuffed, “forced into a wheelchair, then tied up on a gurney” and taken by ambulance to New York Downtown.
After nurses and attendants there ignored her demands to be released, Sowers began untying her restraints until a staffer spotted her and shouted: “Hey, it looks like we got a Houdini here,” she claims.
She was then wrapped up in a “mini” straitjacket and injected with an anti-psychotic drug that immediately “knocked her out,” the next morning.
The next morning, Sowers escaped through an exit door after a nurse “unrestrained” her and let her use the bathroom.
“The hospital did not try to retrieve her, or even call, but did send her a bill . . . which she has no intention of paying,” her papers say.
Spokeswomen for the city and the hospital declined comment.