According to documents provided by the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, Captain Kristin Blanchard, 43, was fired on May 20 for failure to obey the law, untruthfulness, and dishonest and improper conduct.
The termination letter noted Blanchard’s conduct on May 16. A State Highway Patrol report from around 3:30 a.m. on that day indicates Blanchard crashed into a guardrail while trying to take the off-ramp from Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway onto NC-133, headed north in the direction of her residence. The crash resulted in $7,000 worth of damage to Blanchard’s vehicle and $3,400 in damage to the guardrail.
On Tuesday, Blanchard was cited with two class two misdemeanors and an infraction by the highway patrol.
According to the citation, Blanchard failed to report the accident, which damaged her 2022 Dodge Durango and also an NCDOT guardrail. She was also charged with ‘resisting, delaying, and obstructing’ a state trooper, “by being untruthful and deceiving when questioned about a collision she was involved in.” The citation noted she “gave a name of a driver knowing that she was driving at the time of the collision.” Blanchard was also allegedly driving at an unsafe and unreasonable speed on the curve, an infraction.
Blanchard joined NHCSO as a detention officer over twenty years ago, in 2005. In 2020, she was promoted to Captain. Her most recent salary was $62.52 an hour.
