One of the Kat’s best friends had an unwelcome knock on the door Sunday morning at 0800. Cuppla local PD come to tell her that her brother had been killed in a car crash in a wealthy exurb at 0145 earlier that same day. Twisty road, not well lit. Going too fast. Left the pavement, through a fence, back onto the tarmac to roll over a couple of times. The young man ejected from the back seat, unstrapped. Killed pretty much instantly. Another kid seriously injured. Head trauma. The driver drunk, 17. Off to juvie on charges of negligent homicide and DUI. Had a full ride to Duke, but not any more. And where are your parents?
Overseas, on their 20th anniversary.
Pretty much the nightmare scenario all the way around. Good kids, mostly. Pretty far from perfect. But which among us were, age 17?
Much weeping on Sunday afternoon, and the media around the local high school the next day all too willing to thrust microphones into the faces of children who have not yet learned to process such news. Who never really suspected that they’d have to. Bad things happening to other people, mostly.
Everyone goes through this eventually, but for the Kat and her friends this is their now. It shatters the presumption of invincibility, leaves them groping for a handle on the moment. How to feel. What to say.
Chatted about it at the family table last night. Wasn’t it all awful?
It was.
Hadn’t the driver been punished enough? Living with it as he’d have to do, forever.
Em, no. I don’t think. Eyes flicking to my face, surprised.
A young man died, I said. Because another voluntarily got himself drunk, and voluntarily drove. Another kid lost his life and there aren’t any do-overs from that. No take-backs. The other parents might forgive, but the state gets its say as well. Laws were broken. If we don’t pick a thing and say, no – not this. Then “this” is considered acceptable, and grief is a purely private matter.
We don’t hang men for stealing horses. We hang men that horses might not be stolen. Best thing that comes out of this is that some other kid calls a cab some day, rather than bundling in unstrapped. Or some other kid recognizes that bad things don’t always happen to other people. And maybe he could spend the night instead.
You salvage what you can.
My prayers to Kat and her friends
V
My prayers also. Good Job with the facts of life talk…I hope I never have to give one under the same circumstances.
Sigh.
Happened to my best friend in 8th grade (and that’s 40 years ago), and the guy who hit him walked. Never forgave that one…such a bright future wiped away in a second of stupidity. You’re right…we mete out punishment as deterrence — to prevent others from committing the same idiocy.
The wife and I were hit by a drunk driver in 1992. She’s had 22 surgeries since. We went to the judge and asked that, instead of jail, our guy do 1 year of community service in either the Emergency Room or in a rehab clinic. He also had to submit to alcohol testing each month. Here’s hoping he still stops and thinks about it each time he gets behind the wheel…because the wife does.
That moment of bad judgment will live on forever in their lives. Here’s hoping the kids can focus on the life lived, rather than the one lost.
Went through that Christmas of Junior year in HS; Debbie. Fellow student ran her down, drunk, w/ remainder of details unimportant. The following year one of anguished ‘why?’ for the family. We missed her at graduation.
Following year at Christmas, just after getting home from Lakehurst, buddy Mark stops by to pass along that mutual friend Kim center punched a telephone pole on a rainy night; pole won.
I really miss Kim sometimes. She was a lot of fun…
Immortal we are not. And we do think later on how their lives might have turned out.
I feel for the Kat and her friends. It’s a heart rending transition, learning some of life’s lessons in such a brutal way. My sympathies to her, and prayers for you and the Hobbit to help her through this.
v/r
“We don’t hang men for stealing horses. We hang men that horses might not be stolen.”
So true. And I was once able to salvage something from an irresponsible teenage tragedy.
As a high school junior, I was excited and pleased to be invited to a senior post-graduation party, in an abandoned quarry on a winding gravel road.
But upon driving home after the party, we came upon a car loaded with seniors that had missed a narrow bridge and crashed into a creek. In the days when few wore seat belts, some were ejected. Three died or were dying, two were severely injured, and one was hardly injured at all – he was snoring in his drunken stupor on a mud bank amid the moans and crying of the others. We tried to get down to help them, but the creek’s banks were much too steep, and the paramedics and fire department were soon there.
The driver died, so there were no charges against him… here on earth.
As a parent, I can think of nothing worse than losing a child. And if that child is lost by someone’s negligence, it must be evermore painful. Justice needs to be served. But more importantly, something must also be done so this never happens in the future – no more horses stolen; no more teenagers dying.
And what I personally salvaged from that awful night has fortunately stayed vividly with me all these many years. It probably has saved me (and perhaps others including friends and family) from the same fate on more than one occasion.
My prayers go out for all involved and affected.
Jaime. My senior year. No alcohol. Just speed. None of us who still drive past that bend in the road by the Animal Shelter ever forgets.
I’m sorry the Kat has to face this – at 17 or any age. And, in a way, I am sorry for the driver as well. Two lives were lost that evening. What a waste. My prayers are with them all.
So sad. My thoughts and prayers for all involved…
Made me realize how lucky I have been in some ways. I have no such stories as those above.
Rather than completely avoidable events, my sense of mortality came from my father having died when I was eleven, and the school janitor falling through the 30-foot gym ceiling skylight into the middle of high school PE class (I wasn’t there, but my classmates were). It certainly colored everything that happened after…
What continues to amaze me is that the kids in the car wearing seat belts basically got off with nothing but scratches. If we could teach that!
Sometimes wish we were wired so that what we had to go thru, and could only learn by experience, could be automatically passed along to those that follow us. Genetically like.
I think.
Hard life lesson for your daughter, and an example of why I still hate getting a phone call or a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Not often is the news good.
Thoughts and prayers are with you & yours Lex.
Sorry Lex.
That’s two grim reminders in pretty rapid succession.
My teachers always figured punishment was a needed part of reconciliation. If a bright young man is immediately ‘forgiven’ his murder of his own friends, how will he be free to forgive himself when he has been punished enough? or if he were another kind of man, how would he convince himself not to act again as he had done that same night?
Accepting the state’s punishment as just allows him to resume fully his own life when the punishment is done. He’ll always have to live with his actions, but surely he can live more easily and more fully once he has performed his publicly demanded penance?
Oh, how I hate drunks. I hate how they don’t pull over when I light them up, and I hate how they argue that they are ‘just fine’ when they can’t even sit up straight. I hate fighting with them, and I hate how they barf and piss on the back seat of my Crown Victoria, and crap themselves. I hate having to get a couple of jailors to help get them out of the back of the car.
But most of all, I hate that they just don’t seem to care.
No one can justify his actions better than a person who drives drunk. I’ve heard all the stupid reasons why, “I know my limits, and a six pack is hardly enough to make me really drunk”. People I work with have finally quit saying stupid things like this around me since I always go off the deep end by telling them what kind of self-denying, selfish a$$holes they are, and that included one of my bosses after he’d picked up his second DUI in three years. He started bitching about the cops and I told him in a pretty cold voice that you should thank them, they are trying their best to keep you alive, not to mention everyone that gets near you when you are drunk and behind the wheel.
I seriously get cycled up when I read this kind of stuff. Friend of mine in high school died at the hands of a drunk driver. The driver got off with little or no punishment, earning my eternal disgust, and later when on to be a cop. Long story short, I got his karma fixed by diming him out when he showed up at my door drunk looking for his girlfriend…in uniform and in his cruiser.
Lex, ever so glad you had the talk with Kat.
Come visit us. As all the troops tell me, our base CO had one DUI on base and another off-base. He’s still a CAPT and the CO. They know where they would be.
Just be sure to tell Kat you love her every time she walks out the door. They can’t hear it enough, and you can’t say it enough. Prayers for the family and the friends. Went to one just like Jan of this year. youngun was on his way to Quantico after having just graduated in Dec and semester early. alcohol, speed, trees = a tragedy. His Dad is not the same man. Such loss must be truly a burden only God can help carry.
My sympathy to Kat, her friends, and the family of the young person. And to you. It’s never easy to be a parent and watch your child go through something like this.
Unfortunately, kids don’t learn. Or at least they aren’t learning around here. I’ve watched my son and his friends go through this way too many times since their HS graduation in 07. I keep hoping they’ll learn but they just don’t seem to. In fact, my son’s HS graduation was a media circus because of an accident that happened just the day before.
After the most recent accident, my aunt commented that she felt sorry for the driver, who was severely injured and who had killed his girlfriend. My response? I don’t feel the least bit sorry for him. He chose to drink and then get behind the wheel of a car. I’m not too sympathetic toward the friends who chose to get in the car with him, when he was drunk, but I am sorry that our local HS and town has lost yet another young life.
My heart breaks for Kat as she faces this. I’ve been there myself in HS (20 some odd years later and I can still hear his mother wailing at the graveside) and I keep ending up there as an adult. Damn it, I don’t want to have to do it anymore!
It’s an old tale… too often told.
I had a cousin once. He was the youngest of nine… and the brightest.
He got into a Firebird with his drunken best friend and was ejected
when the car rolled over… died from his injuries at 19.
The drunken friend HAD used his seat belt and wasn’t injured.
I’ve grandchildren approaching this age and I worry… maybe overmuch.
It’s too bad we can’t hold them at ten years of age forever.
(And I know that they all have to learn and grow their own way.)
Lost a good friend in the 9th grade, though it wasn’t by a drunk driver. It was the afternoon of graduation. He was helping his dad bring in some hay, and he rolled the tractor over on himself. That brought home to me the fact of my own mortality. He was supposed to be right beside me when we graduated, and instead there was an empty seat.
I can state proudly that I have NEVER once been behind the wheel of a car after drinking. I’ve always lived close enough to the pub to walk, or got a taxi. My kids depended on me to be there (and one still does) and I’ve never taken that responsibility lightly.
Yet, they always complain about my telling them how much I love them whenever they leave the house. Like G-Man says. You never know when it will be the last time.
1992, my cousin was a sophomore in high school, so honored that an upper classman he was sweet on had invited him to prom. Three couples in a car, not enough seat belts, the senior driving, driving drunk. Senior hit a pole, my cousin, the only kid without a seatbelt went through the windshield, hit the pole, and died. He was 16? Maybe? Beautiful boy, academically and athletically gifted. Nothing happened to the driver, the son of wealthy parents. I wonder, the driver is 36 now, does he sleep at night? Does it bother him? Did it ever? The healing never happened for my cousin’s family. This 18 years later… a family destroyed. I think sometimes healing was hindered because the law was not on my dead cousin’s side.
I tell this story to every teenager. I have personally put my phone number in my son’s friend’s cell phones. No drinking and driving. If they drink, no questions from me, just call me, I will pick them up. Don’t get in a car with people who are drinking. Call me. No questions. I am safety. My old Webelos are Boy Scouts now… they tell their other scouts the story of Mrs. L’s cousin. I hope someone is listening.
My sympathies to Kat and her friends. A horrible awful lesson at the expense of someone else. I think the probability of Kat ever getting in a car with someone under the influence has just been completely negated.
Oh Lex, so sorry for the Kat and her friends. This is hard enough on the adults, let alone those among us who still belive they are ten feet tall and bulletproof.
Like others, I have stories. The 16 year old junior David Rannikko who was dating one of my friends who was killed by a drunk driver who dragged him 50 feet and left him to die while he saved his own ass. Turned himself in about a week later – I don’t remember what happened to the drunk. I think about David sometimes – he was very sweet, popular and kind, full of promise.
My best friend’s niece was killed by a drunk driver at age 18 – just 6 weeks after she graduated from high school. The drunk drove the wrong way up a highway exit ramp at 50mph and hit a car with 4 kids in it head on. Nikki was the only one who died; 2 others were seriously injured and recovered. The 4th will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. As far as I know, they were all wearing seatbelts. The drunk got 10 years in jail and was out in 7. The families sued him and they each did get settlements. Then to add insult to the worst – the family of my friend’s niece was victimized by their attorney some years later – he stole their investments that included the settlement.
My sympathies to Kat and the family.
I’m reminded of a scene from a Viet Nam novel I read where two members of a platoon were killed because they weren’t vigilant while on patrol. The sergeant in command of the squad made the other members of the squad look at the bodies and, rather than wallowing in sympathy, made the very real point that these men had died because they hadn’t followed the rules.
It’s tough to do in a tragedy and if you do, you’re viewed as cold-hearted, but kids think they are invincible and need to be taught that they are not.
My son’s football team lost a member two years ago because he backed out of a country driveway without looking and was t-boned by a passing car. I made it a point to tell my son that Kyle didn’t plan on geting killed that day – it happened because he wasn’t paying attention in the deadly game that is driving. Therefore, it CAN happen to you too and to think otherwise is self-deluding.
My son hated to hear it but, for awhile after the accident, I made it a point to say to him as he headed out the door, “Remember Kyle’. He took the message in the spirit in which I intended which was, “Please be alert and careful – I love you and don’t want to lose you.”
After four years as a street cop and sixteen years of practicing law, I can tell you story after story. Drunks are in a class by themselves. Such grief for absolutely no reason.
Something occurred to me in rereading this…
Ultimately the drunk driver is responsible for his choices, but as I read that last paragraph and thought of times I’ve been with friends and worried about them driving, I thought maybe there’s one more thing that can be salvaged: the inspiration for a youngster to have the courage to say to a friend, “If you want to get in that driver’s seat, you’re gonna have to go through me first.” Sometimes that isn’t enough (and then you sic the police on them). But sometimes it is.
I’m friends with someone who was that driver… 35 years later he’s still paying. Not because anyone forces him to – he did his time – but because he can’t forgive himself. In reality, two children died that day in my friend’s car; one is just waiting for his body to catch up.
Like Potosi Joel says, there is no true reconciliation without punishment &/or restitution, but in a case like this, no amount of punishment and no price can recover what’s been lost. For either of them.
My sympathies to Kat and her friends. This will be a long, sad year.
My sympathy to Kat and her friend’s family. The young man who caused the accident may not get out of prison until he is 30. The message must be conveyed that drunk driving destroys lives. There’s nothing smart, fun, or cool about it. I lost a friend to drunk driving while in college and never forgot that a bad decision can last a lifetime.
I have a sixteen year old daughter. She will read this tonight after she gets home from school…all of it.
I think it might save her or her classmate’s life.
I understand…I was a pallbearer 13 times before I reached the age of 28. These were my friends coffins, not older relatives. Most of ‘em were car crashes. I’m all about taking a CAB/TAXI…but it’s way deeper than that…of course, you know that.
I hang out with a Rugby team…as you know, they drink until it’s all gone or the birds are chirping….I have no problem with that…JUST GET A SOBER RIDE home.
My friend has a son who put together a team (his football mates) of his friends who will come and pick people up, drive them home in their own vehicle…even buy some beer or whatever on the way home. They do it for free…but the tips are great.
I, also, know people who can never forget, and will forever themselves for killing their friends. They will carry this for the rest of their life.
Sad, but true.
It is what it is.
Lex, I’m glad that there was an adult at table at your house at dinner on Sunday night. These life lessons are hard. But they must be given, and hopefully, absorbed and understood.
And G-Man, your advice to tell your children that you love them every time they walk out the door is good–and it goes both ways. I traveled, and flew, a great deal in my business career. I had friends who died in business travel–one on the American Airlines DC-10 that had an engine pylon fail on takeoff at O’Hare back in ’76 or ’77. Others on the PSA DC-9 that collided with a light aircraft on approach to Lindbergh Field.
I made it a point to tell my children–and wife, that I loved them every time I left on a trip. Teenage daughters will occasionally get ticked off at their father. My youngest got mad at me one time when she was 17 or so, and said that my practice of telling her that I loved her as I left on a trip was “just your way of saying goodbye”.
She was, and is, a smart young woman, but I don’t think she realized how true her statement was.
My son played lacrosse all through HS and college. The LAX boys do like to have a bit of fun. Now, he knows I’m not plaster saint. But when I can’t drive my wife drives home, and he’s seen that happen. Maybe that’s why he listened when I impressed upon him that I’d much rather pick up his live body in my car than pick out his dead one in a morgue – any time, day or night, no questions asked. That ended up morphing into the occasional late night phone call that said “I’m staying over, see you tomorrow morning”, which worked fine as well.
In a local suburb, when there’s a drunk driving accident the cops tow the wreck to the corner of a very busy intersection and leave it there for a week with a sign saying what happened and who died.
We all obviously have our personal experiences and stories. Won’t bore you with mine except to observe there is a reason for that old folk saying : “Here today, gone tomorrow.” It’s a truism about the nature life more than most like to admit.”
Not a posting I wanted to read on my daughters 21st birthday. Already gave her the reminder and the love today.
Both my kids seemed (hopefully) to have gotten the message when texting while driving took two classmates a couple years back. I have secretly tailed the boy a couple times now that he has his own car to see how he drives when I am not around. Haven’t needed to chat with him, yet.
the inspiration for a youngster to have the courage to say to a friend, “If you want to get in that driver’s seat, you’re gonna have to go through me first.” Sometimes that isn’t enough (and then you sic the police on them). But sometimes it is.
Yes. This is why I tend to refrain when out with friends.
My best friend in high school and I got into a fist fight in high school (tells you how drunk he was, fighting with a girl) because he wouldn’t give up his keys.
I won.
He’s still alive.
I’ve got a few of these stories also, but don’t feel like sharing. Makes you want to know where your loved ones are, right this darn minute.
And I hate late night phone calls more than about anything.
My sympathy to The Kat and her classmates. Hopefully the classmates have families like yours that will be there for them.
Girl I knew was out driving around and was so intoxicated she drove up onto a sidewalk without noticing…ended up blowing a .10. Somehow got it knocked down to reckless driving and (still question how this occurred) continued on in the program to get her commission and is now a 2d Lt in the Air Force.
I would ask if she ever thinks about what she did and how lucky she is that no one got injured or killed, but I already know the answer to that…even when flat out confronted about it (she used to be an acquaintance of mine until this happened) she refused to take any sort of responsibility for her actions. Sum total of what she had to pay: court costs and a 6 month license suspension (a restriction she pretty much ignored). Militarily all she got was a counseling session and the suspension of her scholarship for a semester. My scholarship was yanked permanently when I changed my academic major. (As it should be, I might add…doing so violated the contract I had signed with the Air Force. Apparently driving under the influence doesn’t constitute a breach of contract.)
Am I still more than a little bitter about all of that? You bet your ass…all of these stories highlight just how much of a deadly weapon you become when you get behind the wheel of a car intoxicated. I hope I never run into this particular individual again…not sure I’d be able to restrain myself from getting into some trouble with Article 133.
Just saw the remains of the car on the news. Not much left of it. Might be able to salvage the tires.
Ejecting out a side window is not the way I want to go.
Going to work one day in early June this year and got passed by 6 cops going the speed of heat – and I was doing 80. A minute or so later I rounded the bend on I-295 and was confronted by more flashing lights then I’d ever seen in one place in my life. Two helicopters, a half-dozen ambulances, three fire trucks and about two dozen police/highway patrol cars. I figured somebody had hit the trees big time, but all I could see was an SUV sitting on the shoulder facing the wrong way, apparently intact.
No alcohol involved, but nine sophomores from one of the local high schools had decided to partake of a local custom and bag one of the last days of class and head to the beach, in this case one on Amelia Island. The driver was a 15 and a half year old driving his girl friend’s parents’ Ford Explorer, which seats seven, I think when the right rear tire blew. I think he was the only one wearing a seat belt. IIRC, three of them died at the spot, and one a few days later. One of them was found 275 feet from the vehicle.
Don’t know if he was speeding or not, but the speed limit is 65 and very few people go that slow. Also don’t know if he had their permission to drive the car or not, but he was driving on a temp permit which requires a licensed adult in the car, of which there were none.
He has been charged.
In lots of cases, someone will say, “Je’s been punished enough by (insert outcome).”
The problem with this is, where does it end?
Roman Polanski’s supporters are using this very argument to justify dropping the case and releasing Mr. Polanski.
As hard as it is, vehicular homicide is the appropriate charge, along with DWI, and the court system needs to be allowed to work.