Background
Shortly before 3:25 a.m., Ajay Gregory Pierangeli drove off the road and crashed into a building, killing two passengers and injuring two others and himself. An ambulance driver reported that the vehicle had been traveling at high speed, swerving repeatedly, and had gone airborne before the crash. A passenger also had been hanging out a window and behaving unusually shortly beforehand. Pierangeli was unconscious and seriously injured when emergency personnel transported him to a hospital.
At the hospital, an officer directed staff to draw Pierangeli’s blood without first obtaining a warrant. The officer understood that Pierangeli might require urgent procedures and believed there was insufficient time to seek a warrant without risking alteration or loss of evidence. Hospital staff also independently drew blood for treatment, which revealed a blood-alcohol concentration of .282. Pierangeli moved to suppress the separate law-enforcement-directed sample, arguing that police lacked probable cause to believe he had driven while intoxicated and that no exigency justified the warrantless draw. After the circuit court denied the motion, he pleaded guilty to two counts of homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle and appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals affirmed. It held that the totality of the circumstances gave police probable cause to believe Pierangeli had operated while intoxicated. His repeated swerving, high speed, airborne movement, direct collision with a concrete building, the passenger’s unusual conduct, and the early-morning timing shortly after bar closing made intoxication more than a mere possibility. The court did not rely on a paramedic’s testimony that another crew member smelled alcohol because the record did not show that police knew of that observation before the draw.
Applying the rule governing unconscious suspected impaired drivers from Mitchell v. Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Court of Appeals’ subsequent Mitchell decision, the court explained that a warrantless hospital blood draw is generally reasonable when police have probable cause and the driver’s unconsciousness requires urgent hospital care. Suppression would require Pierangeli to show both that his blood would not otherwise have been drawn and that police could not reasonably have believed a warrant application would interfere with pressing needs or duties. He could not satisfy the first requirement because the evidence established that hospital staff drew his blood independently for treatment purposes, so the court did not address the second.
Key Takeaways
- Probable cause arose from the combined circumstances of the erratic, high-speed driving, severe unexplained crash, unusual passenger behavior, and time of night, even without an alcohol odor known to police.
- For an unconscious suspected impaired driver taken for urgent hospital treatment, a warrantless blood draw is generally constitutional under the controlling Mitchell framework.
- A defendant cannot obtain suppression under the narrow exception to that rule without proving both required elements; Pierangeli failed because the hospital independently drew blood for medical treatment.
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates how Wisconsin courts apply the unconscious-driver exception to the warrant requirement after a serious suspected intoxicated-driving crash. It also confirms that probable cause may rest on the overall driving behavior and surrounding circumstances rather than traditional indicators such as an odor of alcohol or a witness expressly describing the driver as impaired.
The opinion is unpublished and, under Wisconsin law, generally may not be cited as precedent or authority except for limited permitted purposes.