One adult has been charged following a UTV crash involving three minors in Jenkins County over the weekend. The Millen News first reported the incident.
Hannah Reeves Derriso was booked into the Jenkins County Jail on March 2 after deputies responded to a crash on Old Louisville Road and Charlie Jones Road. The crash, which involved a UTV flipping, left two with minor injuries and a third being life-flighted to Savannah.
According to an incident report provided to TheGeorgiaVirtue.com, Jenkins County 911 received an automated crash notification from a cell phone not long before 10:00 p.m. on Saturday night. Deputies arrived to find an overturned Can-Am Defender Xt on its roof and numerous alcoholic beverages scattered around the crash site. Two juvenile males were up and walking while a third was unconscious but breathing. Jenkins County SO requested the assistance of the Georgia State Patrol due to the alcohol beverages on scene and the seriousness of the crash, the report reads.
Deputies believed that the minors had consumed alcohol and conducted field sobriety tests on the driver. The Department of Juvenile Justice was also contacted due to their ages.
It was determined that the minors were traveling back to the home of Hannah Derriso at the time of the crash. At least one of the minors involved admitted to law enforcement that Minor A had ‘two to three swallows of liquor and at least seven to nine beers.” Minor B admitted to having four or five beers. The amount of alcohol consumed by Minor C was unknown at the time of the report.
The reporting deputy subsequently interviewed Hannah Reeves Derriso due to the minors stating that they were returning to her home. She told deputies that Minor B was living with her and her son. According to the report, Derriso and the minors had been at a pond house and were traveling back to her house at the time of the crash.
“Hannah advised me that her beer was in a blue rolling cooler and that the red cooler was [juvenile’s] but the last she saw it only had Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew. I asked Hannah why she let the kids ride off with her beer she replied that she lived from where we were standing outside the Emergency Room to the nearby doctor’s office from the pond house so they had to put the coolers in the back of the Can-Am and they were gonna bring it up to the house. She went to the house to clean up from cooking spaghetti and her son was ready to go to bed.”
The Incident Report from the Jenkins County Sheriff’s Office indicates that Derriso was handcuffed, arrested, and charged with Reckless Conduct. She was booked into the Jenkins County Jail and then released.
Derriso is no stranger to the law. In 2023, she pleaded guilty to felony charges in Screven County after she was arrested for providing contraband to a Screven County Correctional Institute inmate while she was employed at the county annex. A judge sentenced her under the First Offender Act and she served 170 days in a Probation Detention Center. She is currently on probation.
The minor who was life-flighted to Savannah has since been released from the hospital.
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