Rena Giancherio: Drunk Mom Speeds Away To Buy More Booze — Doesn’t Notice Something Very Important

Rena Giancherio was so completely drunk on Monday afternoon, police in Farmington, Minnesota, say, that when she got in her car and sped off — planning to drive to a liquor store to buy even more booze — she didn’t even realize that there was something extremely important clinging to the outside of her vehicle.

That something was her own daughter, age 8, who was apparently so upset that her plastered, 46-year-old mom was about to get behind the wheel that she grabbed on to the car and wouldn’t let go — and held on until she was thrown from the vehicle to the asphalt below.

“I went over to check on her and her knees are all cut up,” said 16-year-old neighbor Terry Heller, who saw the whole thing at around 3:30 Monday. “She’s on the curb just crying and the mom is already gone, just drove off, she didn’t stop or look down.”

According to Heller’s account, the little girl was standing on the vehicle’s running board, pounding on the driver’s side window. But her mom was apparently too blotto to notice her desperate daughter — or she was just too drunk to care.

Giancherio just looked straight ahead and drove off, with the little girl still holding on to the car. But the girl could not hold on for long.

“That is when I started freaking out,” Heller said. “What if she was holding on and they got onto the highway, she could have fallen off, or got hit by another car?”

The teen’s own mother quickly called 911.

When police showed up, the 8-year-old — who miraculously avoided any serious injuries — told them that her mom had consumed a half a bottle of some kind of liquor. But Giancherio brazenly denied to police, who noted that the woman’s speech appeared to make no sense, that she had been drinking at all.

At that point, the little girl grew “very upset… and called her mother a liar,” the police report said.

A security video at a nearby liquor store taken shortly before the disturbing incident showed Giancherio purchasing a large bottle of a clear liquid — presumably an alcoholic beverage.

Though she denied being drunk, a breathalyzer test showed that not only was the mom drunk, she was really drunk — with a blood alcohol level of.30, which is just shy of four times the legal limit.

Giancherio is certainly not the first mom to drive drunk with a child in the car recently. In May, an Oklahoma City mother tried to leave a bar so inebriated she could barely stand up. But when the bar manager pursued the woman, Catherine Durham, to her car, she found Durham’s 8-month-old baby in the car.

The latest drunk mom, Rena Giancheriom, has been charged with two counts of criminal vehicular operation, child endangerment, and DWI.

[Image: Dakota County Sheriff’s Department]