When police arrested Jennifer Rush on Saturday afternoon as she walked along the beach wearing only a ragged wet T-shirt, it wasn’t their first run-in with the apparently drunken and nearly naked woman, reports the Panama City News-Herald.
This year alone, police have arrested Rush for “exposing her breasts and rear end” to bowling alley patrons, boarding a charter bus loaded with BP contract workers and “exposing her breasts,” and “exposing her vaginal area to several bystanders … including a child” as she lay on a bench in front of a bar, according to police reports.
But the State Attorney assigned to this case isn’t rushing to judgment.
State Attorney Glenn Hess, a former circuit judge, said he’d like to stop the cycle of “just rolling [Rush] through the system” and to get her help with a sentence that includes more than just fines and jail time, reports the News-Herald.
Rush appears to have a “substance abuse problem,” Hess told the News-Herald, and would be better served in a treatment center.
If that help isn’t found, Hess told the News-Herald, he’s worried about where the problem might lead.
In the latest arrest, deputies reported that Rush’s “breasts, buttocks and genitalia” were clearly visible through the holey white T-shirt, “which was basically transparent,” according to the News-Herald.
After a 2006 incident, a gas station employee told police the then-19-year-old Rush “was intoxicated … yelling obscenities and crude remarks to the families using the gas station and … was exposing herself indecently.”
A few days later, police responded to “a drunken female wandering in and out of traffic” on Front Beach Road, “showing her breasts and genitalia to traffic,” according to a Panama City Beach Police Department report. The next month, an officer reported finding her in a parking lot “wearing nothing but a black tank top” and “so intoxicated that she was almost struck by several vehicles.”
In four years of reports, police only once listed an occupation for Rush: dancer at a topless bar.
Hess added that he doesn’t think the court’s attitude toward Rush — or the charges levied against her — would be more severe if she were a man, according to the News-Herald.
Photo: mugshotsusa.com
