YPSILANTI (WWJ) - A man previously convicted of gun charges is back behind bars after police say he used a firearm to get a free pop at a Taco Bell drive-thru in Washtenaw County last year.
Eddie Lee Nailor, 31, was arrested in the incident on Dec. 14 and is facing new charges of possessing a firearm, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Feb. 1.
In court documents, police said they were called to a Taco bell at 2559 Washtenaw Ave. in Ypsilanti after an assistant manager reported that one of his employees encountered a man with a gun in his lap while working the drive-thru.
The assistant manager told police he knew something was wrong when the employee handed the customer a free pop. When he asked her why she had, she told her boss that she was "dealing with a man who had a gun in his vehicle."
She also said the man had an alcoholic beverage in his console.
“She was trying to ‘get him out of there by giving him whatever he wanted,’” the complaint said.
The assistant manager told police that the vehicle the man was driving, a silver Chevrolet Impala, left the restaurant five minutes before their arrival and was last seen driving west on Washtenaw Ave.
Roughly 30 minutes after Washtenaw County officials issued a "be on the look out" around 11 p.m., two county deputies spotted the suspect vehicle in Superior Township.
The deputies were able to pull the vehicle over at an apartment complex in the 8800 block of Macarthur Boulevard and approached the driver, later identified as Nailor.
Deputies told Nailor and his female passenger about the call from Taco Bell, asked if he had a gun in the vehicle and if he would step out of the car.
According to the complaint, Nailor became uncooperative at this point during the traffic stop and told police “I can’t do that,” and, “No." The woman sitting in the front passenger seat also became argumentative and began yelling at the deputies.
When the officers asked for identification, both Nailor and the woman refused.
The complaint states that the deputies repeatedly asked Nailor to get out of the car, but he refused and continued to argue.
At 11:41 p.m., additional Washtenaw County deputies arrived at the scene to provide back up.
One of the deputies that showed up caught the woman stuffing something down her pants. When questioned, the woman said she was "grabbing her weed."
After police asked her to step out of the car multiple times, she finally complied.
When another deputy approached the car with his flashlight, he saw a gun on the floorboard and yelled “gun,” according to records. At that point, Nailor was forcefully removed from the driver’s seat. He was eventually handcuffed on the ground after resisting arrest.
As he was being placed into handcuffs, Nailor “stiffened his body out, cursed at the deputies, continued to argue, and did not willfully allow officers to place him into custody,” according to the criminal complaint
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The woman was also placed into handcuffs and detained because the gun was found in an “open and accessible location,” officials said.
While deputies were interviewing the woman in the back of a patrol car, she said she was confused and didn’t understand why the Taco Bell workers would have called police about them because there was no altercation. She did, though, say the employee gave them a free pop.
The woman told the deputy the gun didn’t belong to her, but didn’t blame Nailor, either, saying he didn’t hand her the gun.
“The deputy explained to (the woman) that the caller from the Taco Bell observed the gun on Nailor’s lap and asked (her) how the gun went from Nailor’s lap to underneath her seat,” the complaint says. “(She) replied, ‘I don’t know.’”
When authorities were interviewing Nailor in the back of a patrol car, deputies told him there was a gun in the car, and he refuted that claim. When he was told about the alleged Taco Bell incident, he also questioned that, according to the complaint.
Deputies searched the car and found the gun on the floorboard, along with a Taco Bell bag and “a large amount of marijuana” in the console, according to the complaint.
While in the back of the police car, Nailor told police he had injured his hand during the arrest, so deputies lengthened the handcuffs. That allowed him to slip the handcuffs under his legs from behind his back to the front of his body, the complaint said.
When deputies told him he wasn’t allowed to do that and he needed to go back to the original position, he refused, according to the plaint.
Authorities then took Nailor to a medical facility to be treated for small cuts suffered during the arrest. He was then taken to the Washtenaw County Jail.
The criminal complaint concludes there’s probable cause that Nailor possessed a loaded, stolen gun while he was prohibited from having a gun because he previously pleaded no contest to armed robbery in Washtenaw County in 2014.
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