Ex-Marine freed from Mexico jail accused of drunk driving in Georgia

By Marty Graham SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - A former U.S. Marine jailed in Mexico last year on weapons charges but freed seven months later so he could seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder has been arrested in Georgia on suspicion of drunken driving and other traffic offenses. Andrew Tahmooressi, 26, was taken into custody on Wednesday morning after a traffic stop. He was charged with driving under the influence, driving with an open container of an alcoholic beverage, reckless driving and improper passing, according to the Emanuel County Sheriff's Office in Georgia. He was released on Thursday on $4,000 bond, according to the county jail's watch commander. Tahmooressi, who left the Marines in 2012 after two tours of duty in Afghanistan, was detained in Mexico after arriving at the border from California last March with three guns in his pickup truck. The military veteran has insisted he had mistakenly gotten onto a southbound freeway ramp in San Diego and that, when he ended up in Mexico by accident, he asked at the San Ysidro crossing to return to the U.S. side. He was arrested instead by Mexican customs agents and charged with firearms offenses. Mexico freed Tahmooressi in October on psychological grounds after a seven-month campaign led by his mother in Florida to win his release, a cause that became a staple of U.S. talk shows and gained support in Congress, principally from U.S. Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican. Bill Richardson, a Democrat and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, helped the U.S. State Department negotiate Tahmooressi's release, and he returned in November to Florida, where he was to undergo PTSD treatment. In January, Tahmooressi was Hunter's guest at the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama on Capitol Hill, according to the Marine Corps Times. (Editing by Steve Gorman and Paul Tait)