Melissa King, former Del. pageant queen, gets probation for underage alcohol possession

Melissa King, the 19-year-old who resigned as Miss Delaware Teen USA after an online porn video surfaced, was given a year of probation Monday for underage alcohol possession in Maryland.
 She appeared Monday in Worcester County District Court in Ocean City on citations for the alcohol violation and a separate theft charge.

King was cited in August after police found a bottle of rum in her father's truck, which she was driving home from work.

Two months earlier, King was cited on a charge of stealing money from a city bus fare box, but prosecutors dropped that charge Monday because of doubts about their case. King resigned her pageant title in February after the online sex video surfaced, but denied appearing in the video.
 King's attorney, Greg Hannigan, said after the brief hearing that the theft charge involved two $1 bus fares, for King and a friend, and the charge should have never been brought. King put the money in the fare box and then took it out after deciding not to ride the bus, he said.
 King received one year of unsupervised probation on the alcohol citation and her friend, Dave Stout, paid about $140 to cover a fine and court costs. Hannigan said after the hearing that King was "relieved." He explained that under the law as the driver she was responsible for the unsealed bottle of Captain Morgan rum found inside her father's truck after a police officer stopped King for a cracked taillight.

 Hannigan told Judge Daniel Mumford that King has been accepted into college and plans to work somewhere on Maryland's Eastern Shore before leaving for college in the fall. After the hearing, Hannigan would not say where King plans to go to college, only that it was somewhere west of the Mississippi River. He said she plans to pursue a career in journalism.