With BAC results in, Twin Cities bus driver charged with being drunk with students aboard

A Twin Cities man was extremely drunk behind the wheel of a school bus as students loaded on board and was combative with police after his arrest, according to charges.

Joshua Nathaniel Lueth, 36, of Hastings, appeared in Washington County District Court last week on two gross misdemeanor counts of second-degree drunken driving and one count of misdemeanor obstructing the legal process in connection with his arrest on Feb. 26 outside Park High School in Cottage Grove.

Lueth was charged by summons and is due back in court on June 5. Messages were left Tuesday with Lueth and his attorney seeking a response to the allegations.

Under court order, Lueth provided within two hours of his arrest a blood sample to police to be tested for intoxication. The results found that his blood alcohol content soon after his arrest was 0.289%, the charges read.

That’s more than four times the legal limit for driving a private vehicle. In Minnesota, it’s a crime for school bus drivers to have any “physical evidence present in the person’s body of the consumption of any alcohol,” the statute reads.

Court records in western Wisconsin show Lueth has a drunken driving case pending from a traffic stop in December. Allegedly, his blood alcohol content was 0.15%, nearly twice the legal limit, and he had a passenger under 16 years old with him.

Also, Lueth was not licensed to drive a school bus, state Department of Public Safety spokesman Mark Karstedt said, because he failed the required background check by the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

The man was driving a bus operated by the Big River Bus Co. in Hastings. Big River’s chief operating officer, Thomas Severson, said Lueth has since been fired.

But Severson pushed back on the state’s statement that Lueth should not have been operating the bus. “He presented a valid temporary license with passenger and school bus endorsements,” Severson said.

According to the charges, at about 3:10 p.m. Feb. 26 a school staff member alerted the resource officer that she was attempting to prevent the bus from leaving based on another staffer’s suspicion that the driver was drunk.

The officer arrived to find Lueth outside the bus, which was occupied by two students, one in a wheelchair. The officer noted that Lueth’s eyes were watery and his speech was slurred and slow. Lueth denied to a second officer that he had been drinking or using drugs.

Lueth was arrested outside the school and taken to police headquarters. While in custody, he refused to remain seated and attempted to spit on an officer. Lueth was then handcuffed and placed in a spit hood.

A police review of the bus’ video in the time Lueth arrived at the school showed him crossing the center line several times and parking incorrectly.