After spending Sunday night in jail following her arrest for purchasing crack and cocaine, former Dancing With the Stars contestant Tatum O’Neal was released from court yesterday. Shockingly, her first remarks were thank yous… to the police who arrested her!

Claiming sobriety, the New York City jail survivor gratefully thanked her law enforcers for keeping her that way: “Just when I was about to change that and wreck my life, the cops came and saved me! I was saved by the bell, by the guys in the Seventh Precinct.”

What I’m wondering was whether or not she was truly sober, thinking we would actually believe that she thanked those cops from the bottom of her heart. Then again, she may very well have been smart enough to learn from her fellow jailbird celebrities and look pretty good whilst being sprung from the can.

So what was her excuse? Ultimately, O’Neal admitted that her family dog’s recent death broke her: “There’s no excuse for what I did. I lost my Scottish terrier, Lena. That seemed to set me off. She got old. She got cancer. She was the fabric of our family. We had to let her go to heaven. My daughter and I had to put her down. It was too horrible for words.”