A License to Kill

The Boston Herald

The reason people drive the way they do, recklessly and with total disregard for others, is because they're allowed to. It doesn't matter what you do behind the wheel. A license to drive is also a license to kill. And maim. And get away with it.

“He didn't mean it. He'd do anything to change what happened. It was an accident.''

William Senne was 18 in July 2003 when he crashed his father's Volvo into state police trooper Ellen Engelhardt's cruiser, which was stopped in the breakdown lane of Route 25 in Wareham. She was doing her job. Senne had been partying.

When you don't die of your injuries, there isn't the emotional impact of a funeral. Injured means you can get better.

But Engelhardt is not better. She's 51 and cannot talk, walk, eat (she has a feeding tube), sit up by herself or hold her head up. Her muscles are atrophied. Her mind? No one knows what she thinks or feels.

Last week, Brockton Superior Court Judge Suzanne V. DelVecchio sentenced Senne, who is now a college student, to two-and-a-half years in jail and 500 hours of community service working with the head-injured. Prosecutors had asked for eight to 10 years. 

Senne will be eligible for parole in 15 months. Engelhardt has already spent 18 months in hospitals trapped in a world not even her daughter can reach. Lora Tedeman is 30 and having a baby in March. Last spring she organized a walk for her mother. ``My selfish reason for doing this,'' she told a reporter, ``is that I have a great belief in the power of prayer. If we can get a 1,000 people, 2,000, however many people in one place at one time and we think about Ellen for that short period of time, maybe it will help her.''

Every day when someone you love is sick or injured, you wake up hoping for a miracle. And every night you lie awake wondering why it didn't come.

“Most of our injuries and deaths occur when we're doing our business in the breakdown lane,'' state police Major John J. Kelley said the day after the crash. ``Somebody comes in and crashes into us. It's terrible, but it's part of being a state trooper.’'

No it isn't. It's part of living in a culture where a driver can run down even a trooper and get away with it. It's part of the ``always thinking about me'' mentality. It could have been me drinking, speeding, talking on the phone, flying down the breakdown lane.

Engelhardt was at the sentencing last week. Slumped in a wheelchair. Eyes closed. Fingers gnarled.

She used to be a beautiful, dynamic, funny, athletic, thoughtful, independent, vibrant woman.

She could have been you. She could have been me. That's what we need to realize. That the victim is the one with the life sentence, not Senne.

We make excuses for drunken and menacing drivers. And put them away for months, not years. He never meant to hurt her, we say.

But look at her. He did.