Sweet Pay Day: Florida Man Gets $37K Settlement After Police Mistook Doughnut Glaze Found In His Car As Meth

A Florida resident has become the focus of a baffling case of mistaken Krispy Kreme glaze when local law enforcers arrested him after finding crystal-like substances inside his car.

In December 2015, 64-year-old Florida man Daniel Rushing was driving home a lady from his church after dropping off a friend from chemotherapy. While the woman who worked at 7-Eleven nearby can easily walk the two miles, Rushing decided to add another good deed to his to-do list for the day.

According to National Public Radio(NPR), the 64-year-old was just driving away from the convenience store when members of the Florida police pulled him over for allegedly driving 42 miles an hour in a 30 zone. The police also claimed that the driver failed to come to a complete stop as he entered the roadway.

After handing over his driver’s license, an officer identified as Shelby Riggs-Hopkins noticed Rushing’s concealed-weapons permit and immediately confirmed whether or not the Florida man had a pistol. She then asked him to step out of the car for safety reasons.

The officer then asked if she and her comrades could search the vehicle, to which Rushing obliged. Watching as four police officers combed his car, Rushing noted how they were very thorough about it.

“You want to tell me about what we found?” Riggs said to him after they finished scouring the vehicle.

“There’s nothing to find,” the 64-year-old responded, sounding a bit confused at the question.

From there, Rushing was informed that the police officers found crystals on the floorboard of the vehicle. After the law enforcers used a roadside field testing kit on the substance, it tested positive for methamphetamine.

Claiming he “never even smoked a cigarette,” Rushing denied the officer’s allegations of possession or use of the illegal substance. The officers showed him the crystals they found.

“That’s glaze from a Krispy Kreme doughnut! I get one every other Wednesday,” Rushing exclaimed, aghast at the allegations against him.

Unfortunately, the officers did not buy it and arrested the 64-year-old Florida man on charges of possession of the illegal substance while armed with a weapon.

The evidence—the crystalline substance found in Rushing’s car—was then sent to a state crime laboratory for further testing, which confirmed the 64-year-old’s claims, as reported by the Orlando Sentinel. It wasn’t meth at all.

Now, the man from Orlando is $37,500 richer after crime lab test results showed that the police officers were wrong about their accusations. Pondering about the events while he sat inside the jail for 10 hours before getting released on bail, Rushing recalled to NPR how he told his wife about the matter over the phone, thinking that it would be a “funny” story they would look back to later on.

“It was funny because I called my wife to tell her what happened, and the guy next to me waiting for the phone started to laugh. He said, ‘This is crazy. I think you got a real good lawsuit here.'”

After filing a lawsuit against the officers, over 730 Orlando police officers were sent to training on how to use field-test kits properly while Riggs-Hopkins was handed a written reprimand for conducting an improper test, CBS reported.

To top that off, Rushing got a $37,500 settlement and all charges against him were dropped.

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