Wold gets change of venue for Scott County OWI case
Andrew Wold, who faces multiple lawsuits in the May 2023 collapse of a downtown apartment building, has been granted a change of venue in the case of an OWI charge.
On Wednesday, a judge granted his request for a change of venue from Scott County. That means his trial will be held in another Iowa county.
Wold, 42, faces a serious misdemeanor charge of operating a vehicle while intoxicated and, in a companion case, speeding. He has waived a speedy trial, court records say.
The test for whether a court should grant a change of venue motion is whether a
“reasonable likelihood” exists that the defendant could not receive a fair trial in the county where the trial is to take place.
In May 2023, a large apartment building in Davenport partially collapsed. Three persons were killed and others injured. “This garnered local and national attention and has resulted in continued coverage of issues relating to the event, including investigation into potential causes, the City’s response, engineering and inspection histories, and the owner of the building,” court records say.
Media attention, court documents say, “has spiraled into other matters outside of the collapse.”
“Indeed, a Google search for ‘Davenport building collapse’ returns 1,440,000 results, and a search for ‘Andrew Wold’ returns 3,390,000 results,” court documents say.
When a motion for change of venue is granted, the prosecution continues in the county where the action is transferred, according to court records.
Court records show pretrial conferences are set for the case on Feb. 21.
The incident on Nov. 11, 2023
A Bettendorf Police Officer in a fully marked police patrol car stopped at the intersection of State Street and 19th Street shortly after 6:30 p.m. Nov. 11, 2023, according to arrest affidavits.
The officer saw a black 2009 Chevy Silverado pickup truck “traveling at a high rate of speed” headed east on State Street, and it passed another vehicle. The officer followed the truck about 11 blocks.
“While I was following the vehicle, I was able to pace his speed at approximately 54 MPH in a posted 30 MPH zone,” the officer alleges in affidavits. “While I was behind the vehicle, the defendant stepped on the gas and started to accelerate again.”
The officer initiated a traffic stop near the intersection of State Street and 30th Street, and Wold pulled into a business in the 2900 block of State Street, affidavits show.
Wold, who was driving, had watery, bloodshot eyes, slurred speech and “smelled of ingested alcohol,” police allege in affidavits. He consented to standardized field sobriety tests and “showed multiple signs of impairment.”
“(Wold) refused to provide a breath sample for the preliminary breath test and was placed under arrest. Once back at the station, (Wold) refused to sign any of the implied consent paperwork or provide a breath sample for the Datamaster,” police allege in affidavits.
A Datamaster is an instrument designed to analyze a sample of a person’s breath and determine the breath alcohol concentration in the sample.
According to affidavits, while officers moved the truck Wold had been driving “they discovered the interior door pocket of the driver’s door had been filled with a liquid substance that smelled strongly of an alcoholic beverage along with an empty tumbler with wet residue on the front passenger seat.”
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