Parent Thanks State Trooper After Son Booked On DUI Suspicion

COLORADO — The parent of a man he stopped on suspicion of drunken driver isn’t who Colorado State Patrol Trooper Camden Nichols would expect to get a compliment from, but the words of encouragement were deep in an email the parent sent to the state patrol in May.

The parent wrote that Nichols had his son take a breath test and, even though the results were “minimal,” still took him in and left the car on the side of the road because he thought the email writer's son smelled like alcohol.

“I want to say here that that is just what needs to happen,” the parent of the DUI suspect wrote in an email shared by the Colorado State Patrol on Facebook.

“From a parent’s perspective, I was pleased with that,” the parent wrote, adding that Nichols allowed his son to call his girlfriend, and waited with him until she showed up, after the booking process was done.

Nichols told KDVR that reading a message like that “makes you feel good.”

“That’s why I got into policing in the first place,” Nichols said. “I take a lot of pride in hearing those good words.”

The parent said it’s “important that we acknowledge the good that our police officers do, particularly when presently all we are hearing is the wrong.”

Nichols told KDVR his goal is to get drunken drivers off the streets before they cause crashes “where someone hurts themselves or hurts someone else.”

The state patrol said Nichols "was able to prevent a tragedy."

More than 900 people died in drunken driving crashes in Colorado during a six-year span in the 2010s.