By Robert Tomlinson
News Director
THREE RIVERS — A former St. Joseph County prosecutor who had a high-profile drunk driving arrest four years ago was arrested in late October this year after another alleged drunk driving incident.
John McDonough, who served as prosecutor from 2008-20 and is currently a member of the Three Rivers Community Schools Board of Education, was arrested by Three Rivers police on the night of Wednesday, Oct. 30 on a charge of Operating While Intoxicated as a second offense.
He was in line to be arraigned Tuesday in St. Joseph County 3B District Court, however on Nov. 6 he waived his arraignment hearing. An attorney pretrial hearing, according to the court docket, is scheduled for Friday, Dec. 6 at 8:30 a.m. McDonough has retained attorney Michael Hills, according to publicly-available court records.
According to the police report, obtained via Freedom of Information Act request, police conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle he was driving at 9:48 p.m. at West Michigan Avenue and Railroad Drive for having a headlight out. The officer noted in their report that the vehicle was “weaving within its lane and out of its lane” beforehand, and that while talking with McDonough, the officer observed “signs of intoxication,” including watery and “extremely bloodshot” eyes.
The officer, in their report, stated McDonough explained the weaving by saying he had been trying to get an application going on his phone so he could listen to a game, and the damaged headlight, he claimed, had been because of his stepson damaging the vehicle. He also told the officer he hadn’t had anything in his mouth over the last 20 minutes prior to the traffic stop.
Field sobriety tests were performed, and the officer noted McDonough showed four of six signs of intoxication during the test. The balance tests were not performed at McDonough’s request, due to medical conditions. The officer also “noticed an odor of intoxicants” coming from him while standing outside of the vehicle, according to the report.
McDonough then took a breathalyzer test, in which he registered a blood alcohol level of .092, above the legal limit of .08. He was then arrested and taken to the Three Rivers Police Department for processing. Subsequent breathalyzer tests in the 40 minutes following the first test, according to the report, showed blood alcohol levels at .089 and .088.
Later, McDonough was transported to Three Rivers Health’s emergency room to be checked out for high blood sugar. The report does not say when he was released.
McDonough has had a previous high-profile run-in with the law when it comes to drunk driving. In May 2020, the then-county prosecutor was arrested for driving while intoxicated following a crash in the 17000 block of Lovers Lane in Lockport Township. His blood alcohol level at that time was a .107, according to a police report at the time.
He was formally charged by the Michigan Attorney General’s Office in June of 2020, and in January 2021, he pled guilty to a charge of operating while visibly impaired in that incident, and was sentenced to a year of probation and a continuation of an alcohol treatment plan, which included not drinking or possessing alcohol, not being in an establishment whose primary business is alcohol, and not operating a motor vehicle outside of a restricted license.
The Oct. 30 arrest is the first time he has been arrested since then.
The drunk driving incident was a factor in McDonough losing the Republican nomination for prosecutor in August 2020 to current prosecutor David Marvin, who lost his bid for re-election in the August primary this year to Deborah Davis in a GOP field that also included McDonough.
McDonough, in an October 2021 interview with the Commercial-News, said he had learned a number of humbling things from his first arrest, and said that “it takes work, it takes focus” to get past alcohol addiction. He also said in a letter to the community in October 2021 published in the Commercial-News that he was “deeply sorry for letting all of you down” with his first arrest.
“I have a disease that consumed my life and I allowed it to ignore all of the responsibilities in my life,” McDonough wrote in the 2021 letter. “I deeply regret the decisions I made and all of the hurt and disappointment those decisions caused.”
In a May article by MLive profiling McDonough’s candidacy for prosecutor this year, the outlet said McDonough told them he has “been sober since the incident, with the exception of a few slip-ups,” and that “sobriety is a lifelong battle that he’s fighting.” The news outlet also reported he had not driven after drinking.
Robert Tomlinson can be reached at 279-7488 or robert@wilcoxnewspapers.com.
