ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 4, 1997 TAG: 9704040065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM THE ROANOKE TIMES
To everyone's surprise, the colorful character turned herself in last month to finish her sentence.
India Carol Pickens has never had anything but trouble in Botetourt County, but she's back there now anyway, serving her time.
The Virginia Court of Appeals upheld her conviction for the unlawful wounding of a state trooper, and Pickens, to the surprise of Botetourt's sheriff and prosecutor, turned herself in at the jail last month to finish her sentence.
"She's back where she belongs," Sheriff Reed Kelly said.
"Thus ends the saga of India Pickens," said Commonwealth's Attorney Joel Branscom.
It's been a year and a half since Pickens got liquored up and drove her tractor-trailer down Interstate 81 in Botetourt County, slinging eggs at other truckers.
No one knows exactly how drunk she was. She refused a field sobriety test and then kicked a state trooper in the groin so hard he had to be hospitalized and missed several days of work.
Then she gave a false address to the court and disappeared when she was released.
A few months later, Pickens was found in Tennessee, brought back to Botetourt County and convicted of kicking the trooper, along with a slew of other charges, including driving under the influence, refusing the sobriety test and using a radar detector.
The Pickens story didn't end there.
Locked up in the Botetourt jail, Pickens started writing letters.
She wrote to the governors of Tennessee and Virginia, Botetourt Circuit Judge George Honts and the sheriff of her home county in Tennessee, begging them all to let her serve her one-year sentence back home near her sick daughter. The child had a hole in her heart, she said, and needed her mother.
The Botetourt sheriff and prosecutor objected because the sheriff of Fayette County, Tenn., who would have overseen her sentence, is an old friend of her father, a police dispatcher.
Honts was ready to let Pickens go to her home state when she at last decided to post a $3,500 appeal bond. She disappeared into Tennessee again while the Virginia Court of Appeals heard her case.
In late February, the appeals court decided Pickens had kicked the trooper in the groin "with sufficient violence and brutality" to justify the conviction for unlawful wounding.
"I'm just glad she did the right thing," Branscom said of Pickens' decision to turn herself in. "That's the first step toward rehabilitation."
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