Fort Greene Pastor Arrested For Drunk Driving In Manhattan

A Fort Greene reverend was arrested on Friday night as she exited the Holland Tunnel on the New Jersey side at around 6pm, after other drivers called 9-1-1 reporting her as driving erratically and swerving across lanes, hitting curbs while in the tunnel.

As reported in the New York Post, Diane Reiners — who serves as assistant priest at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine Church, near Columbia University — was found by responding officers with “an open container of Absolut on the center console, vodka in a water bottle, 31 pills of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam prescribed in someone else’s name, and more than 200 pills of tramadol, a potent pain killer.”

The 53-year-old also “allegedly had bloodshot eyes and booze on her breath and slurred her words,” failing a field sobriety test.”

The Post added that another priest at her church said she had been “on a downward spiral” since her husband’s death several years ago to tongue cancer.

“It was a very painful death . . . He was a wonderful man,’’ said Deenar Matthews, a fellow priest at St. John’s in Morningside Heights.

Reiners, who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, chronicled her husband’s cancer battle in Marie Claire magazine in 2010, saying, “We laugh when people say that marriage is hard work. Cancer is hard work; our marriage is easy. But taking care of him can leave me without much time to take care of myself.”

Reiners was ordained in 2012, after her husband died.