Zoe said that her nieces were driving in front of them. Presumably the now dead passenger and her nieces knew he had been drinking. What kind of culpability do they have in this?
Zoe, how is your nephew doing?
Awful, awful story. And, sadly, after battling to save her son’s life, her sister also can look forward to the fun of being sued by her late son-in-law-to-be’s family.
A good friend of mine lost her son, and 2 of his friends, over a decade ago. 4 of them were on break from college and went bar hopping. The driver blew a stop sign and the car were squashed by a tractor trailer. Their remains were so mangled that they never could forensically determine who the driver was. (This was called into question when the parents of the survivor sued the other boys’ families, even though there were witnesses who swore that the survivor was the one behind the wheel. He adamantly denied being the driver, even though he couldn’t recall anything past leaving the second-to-last bar. They settled.)
Such fun.
Being over-tired, being strung out on prescription or over the counter medication, or being extremely emotional (for example, driving after a bitter fight) will all cause you to be an impaired driver. I don’t think very many of us have two feet firmly planted on the ground to be pointing fingers at other people. My personal crusade is against dangerous, unskilled, untrained drivers, period. Driving drunk is part of the bigger picture.
I’m not gonna disagree with that. I’ve been saying for years that driver’s ed should be at least 5x harder and a refresher course should be mandatory every 5 years for life.
Yeah, there are some plain shitty drivers out there who are a danger to everyone else the minute they get behind the wheel even if they’re stone-cold teetotalers. But since you can easily get a nice convenient measurement of BAC but not for shitty driving skills, everyone (even including the shitty drivers!) can get up on their soapboxes and look down on the drinkers with moral impunity.
I have no problem doing that in a drunk driving thread. If you want to rag on shitty drivers, start a shitty drivers thread.
Edit- the fact is that drunk driving is a choice, 100% of the time. Shitty, unskilled and stupid are not always lifestyle choices. And we’re not looking down on drinkers- just those that choose to drive after drinking.
Well, far be it for this lurker to hijack a thread, but it seems to me that it is quite possible to know that one is an unskilled driver, yet still choose to drive. Likewise for choosing to fiddle with the radio, dealing with unruly kids in the back, eating fried chicken, reading the newspaper … in the end it is the driver’s judgment call as to his own ability to drive safely, regardless of the nature of anything that may impair it … but ok, point taken, hijack over.
On the other hand, aren’t we due for a shitty driver pit wreck? Someone should get on that.
Oh, and my condolences to the OP and family.
There is some good news in all of this. My nephew is home with his mother and sister now. Almost as soon as they could release him from critical care, they let him go home because there are so many infections in the hospital. He still has a hematoma in the brain which they are thinking will be reabsorbed.
He has been back to the hospital since he has been home, but I assume that it is the local hospital and they have found some internal bleeding they were unaware of. It must be minor or they must have stopped it because he is home again.
His dad was the one who told him about what happened in the accident and of course, he took it really hard. He is in both physical and emotional pain.
Clothahump, his dad was also a policeman and was a witness to what such accidents can do to the human body.
I asked my sister (his grandmother) if he had finished with his military duty. She said that she guessed that he was in the reserves, but that they might consider him unfit for duty now. She doesn’t know for sure. He was visiting from Chicago at the time of the accident. He was in school studying something to do with pharmocology.
We are so grateful that he is alive. And I will never forget the support of the friends here at the Dope.
Good point. Maybe I’ll do just that.
Zoe, has any memory of that day come back to him yet?
He has a long road ahead of him, but hopefully his family will walk with him through whatever is coming next. I am so sorry that anyone has to deal with this…
Middlebro spent so many teenage summer nights in the ICU with drunk or otherwise od’d folks that he once got greeted with “hey, there you are! You didn’t come for two nights, we missed you! We’re thinking of making you a honorary ER-med, you spend so much time here :D” Those summer nights scared him off the stuff forever.
I hope everybody involved can recover from this, specially your niece and nephew, and that other people close to them can learn from this mistake (who is the poster that has that sig about peeing on the electric fence?).
Zoe, there is nothing more that I can add, but you and your family are in my thoughts and will remain so.
Please feel free to e-mail me if you need anything at all.
My neighbor has four drunk driving convictions. He never hurt anyone, but I don’t think he’ll be the sort to turn his life around and straighten out since not having a car or license won’t keep him from driving drunk as his fourth conviction was on an ORV. Oh, my wacky neighbor.
{{Zoe and family}}
Just an observation, but from the information given, we don’t know that the guy was actually drunk - if you’re at a party and have only one 1-unit alcoholic drink at (say) 20:00 and non-alcoholic drinks thereafter, you’re going to be sober at 03:00. A blood sample will have been taken at the hospital and will determine his blood-alcohol content.
>Not only am I with Seven as far as disagreeing with your “drunk driving is understandable” but I was a keystroke away from a BBQ Pit smackdown!
>There are no words I can use in this forum for you.
>Yes, and being high on crack and playing with a loaded handgun in a daycare is a bad thing to do… but at the same time, understandable.
Well, your anger is clear, but I think you’re aiming at the wrong target. I said “understandable”, but didn’t condone it.
If something is really happening out there, then it’s your responsibility to try to understand it, because there really are explanations of how and why it happens. If you want to change a thing, understanding it is helpful. Not understanding it doesn’t help matters.
There are things that contribute to the problem of drunk driving. We have a history of accepting it, much more so decades ago. We certainly accept drinking. Driving is a daily part of participating in most of our human society. All drivers have to make choices about whether to drive when they are tired or distracted or sick or when the weather is ugly, so it is not as if we can limit our driving to times when it is perfectly safe. Driving is never really perfectly safe. Intoxication is a complicated issue also because one of the things that is impared is the very judgement we must rely upon to choose wisely. You can make a sober, informed decision to start drinking, believing you will stop before you are intoxicated or will not drive if you do become intoxicated. As you grow intoxicated you can continue making incremental decisions but they are no longer sober and informed decisions. Avoiding this trap requires more self awareness and imagination than most other kinds of decision making require. All these statements can be true without any of them justifying or condoning drunk driving. None of these have to be reasons not to have harsh penalties for driving drunk.
Ideally, there would be some easy way to prevent drunk driving, some safety net. In 10 or 20 years it should be very practical for cars to have breathalyzers and video cameras watching the driver, with the intellegence to spot any tricks for circumventing the safety mechanism. If there were a way to have sufficient police on the roads, it’d be great if the probability of a drunk driver being caught quickly was virtually 100%. Having a fairly low probability today, with harsh penalties, does seem somewhat successful as a deterrent, but there must be all kinds of things one could do to improve the present situation. I think one of the most helpful things we could do would be to improve the liklihood of catching and punishing drunk drivers, so that what you might call luck doesn’t separate those of us that kill and maim from those of us who realize in some abstract way that it could have happened, separating us into two groups with such very different futures.
The survivors in the OP have perhaps a half century each, on average, of life ahead of them, decisions ahead of them. The better sense they can make of all aspects of this tragedy, the much better for all concerned. Please don’t think that trying to understand how all this works is in some way slighting the pain they have.
I am genuinely sorry that I ever drove while intoxicated and am thankful, deservedly or undeservedly, that I never happened to hurt anybody. I’ve been dry 22 years and haven’t driven intoxicated for 30 or more. If there was a way to turn into a person who had never done this, I’d like to do it, but am afraid I’m limited to being somebody who hasn’t done it in a long time and never will again, and only able to congratulate those who are a person who had never done this.
And then the only problem is that everybody, including the 90-plus percent of us who have never driven drunk, are being treated like criminals. For convicted drunk drivers and repeat offenders in particular I can get behind this, but if you’re talking about doing it for all cars, I would prefer to be afforded the respect that comes with not having been suspected or convicted of DUI in the past.
I’m pleased to read these relatively good news. I hope your nephew will recover as much and as quickly as possible.
I have a deep seated dislike for people who drive while drunk, or drive and speed (something that few people criticized in this thread), but I certainly do not wish him any more pain and suffering that he already endured and probably will endure.
This thread especially moved me since I had a very close friend staying here during the holidays, whose own young nephew was hospitalized in a severe condition due to another kind of stupid behaviour. She was devastated.
I wish the best possible in these circumstances to you and your family, and especially your niece.
>if you’re talking about doing it for all cars, I would prefer to be afforded the respect that comes with not having been suspected or convicted of DUI in the past.
I am talking about doing it for all cars. I’d gladly give up the respect of my car, as the car has no idea what my history is, and isn’t much of a judge of character anyway. It’d be like having to show ID when making a purchase or boarding an airplane. When somebody has no idea who I am, I take no offense. What kind of citizen would I be if I were unwilling to document my identity and status? There is certainly a public interest in stopping the kind of thing this mechanism is organized around.
But supposing the concensus was that we were unwilling to put up with this - what else could we do? For example, suppose the car could monitor our driving and recognize characteristic intoxicated behavior? For the sake of discussion, suppose it was practical to accurately identify such driving - wouldn’t it be worthwhile for stopping the carnage and tragedy?
I feel like i’m pulling a Ninjachick (or is it girl) here, but you have the choice not to get in to the car with the drunk driver before you end up dead.