Catherine Durham: Bar Manager Tries To Take Her Car Keys — Then Sees Something Terrible In Her Car

Catherine Durham, 33, was drinking at a bar in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, last weekend when the bartenders saw that she wasn’t just a little tipsy — she was really drunk. Apparently Durham had consumed only a couple of drinks at Louie’s Bar and Grill, but they hit her hard.

Not too surprisingly, other bar patrons said that Louie’s wasn’t the first stop that Durham made that evening. She told the other customers that she had been drinking at another bar before stopping by Louie’s.

But she was in Louie’s for about a half-hour and drank two shots when she became falling-down drunk, according to witnesses, stumbling around and unable to speak without slurring her words.

So naturally, she decided to drive home.

Durham stumbled out of the bar, but alert bar employees knew that she could not be allowed to leave — at least not in her own car.

“She started getting a little slurry and I told her you should probably get a cab and drink some water,” one of the bartenders told FOX25 News in Oklahoma City. “She said she needed to get something out of her car.”

Whether she simply needed to “get something” or whether the inebriated woman was actually planning in getting behind the wheel in her impaired condition was not a chance that the bar employees were willing to take.

One of the Louie’s Bar and Grill managers followed Durham out to her car and offered to find her a ride home. Durham apparently declined, so the manager attempted to take the woman’s keys.

That’s when Durham attacked her, according to police documents reported in the local media in Oklahoma City. The woman “became aggressive” and grabbed the female bar manager’s hair.

Now, drunks will be drunks and often put up a fight when concerned friends or even bar employees tell them they’re not fit to drive. But there was another reason that Durham didn’t want the bar manager anywhere near her car — something the manager saw when she was able to see what was in the car’s back seat.

Durham’s eight-month-old baby daughter.

The baby was alone in the car the whole time her mom was inside getting plastered, police say.

The bar manager called 911 and police soon showed up. But before that, according to witness accounts, the highly intoxicated Durham tried to get in the car and drive away with the baby in the back.

The witnesses were able to stop that from happening, fortunately. But when police officers arrived, they saw Catherine Durham carrying the baby in her arms behind Louie’s Bar and Grill — and falling to the ground with the baby in her arms.

The infant — again, luckily — was not injured. But police took the baby from Catherine Durham and placed the little girl with a Department of Human Services employee. They arrested the drunk mom and charged her with child endangerment. The incident comes about a month after two parents in Ohio somehow abandoned their baby in a McDonald’s.

[Image: Oklahoma County Jail]