Drunk drivers' victims
/The Boston Herald
They all come back. Every time there's another delay in the still pending drunk driving legislation. Every time someone shrugs off drinking and driving as something everyone does. Every time some judge who should know better treats drunk drivers as good guys who've slipped up a little, but didn't really mean to do anything wrong. Then, every parent I've ever met and talked to, every dead child whose picture I've held and whose life I tried to imagine, returns - beautiful, bright young people who were walking along a street, playing in a yard, getting in a car, driving home when someone too drunk to walk let alone drive, plowed into them and stole their lives.
I remember the meetings in homes where there are only pictures to tell the stories, bedrooms that feel like shrines, closets full of clothes that will never be worn again, stuffed animals on the beds, gum wrappers, shoes that still bear the wearer's form.
Parents, stunned and sore, look at all this, then talk over coffee or tea, the table set, the props all right, but everything else all wrong.
My files are thick with their words. I reread them today because I cannot believe that tough new drunken driving legislation aimed at getting repeat drunk drivers off the road, aimed at putting them in jail where they belong, is being challenged because the courts are afraid they might be swamped, because the legal system may not be able to handle a surge in arrests. 'There is no way to describe the feeling of kissing our son's cold lips and wishing we could climb onto the gurney and send our warmth into his body. One minute we were a family; the next minute our family was gone.' Carol and George Naughton, whose son Chris, 16, was killed by a drunk driver while on his way home from work the night of Dec. 22, 1990.
'When you get up in the morning, your grief begins all over again. Day after day. What has happened is your only thought. You pray to get through the day and you can't wait to go to bed. People will say to you, 'You have your memories.' They mean well. But they can't even begin to imagine what it is like for me to touch those memories.’
Donna Silva, whose son Christopher Baldwin, 16, was killed by a drunk driver May 23, 1993, while rollerblading. 'You're not happy anymore. You just exist. Things you used to look forward to, you don't. As for having joy, I've lost all that. I'll never be the same person I was before.' Nick Tammaro, whose daughter Lisa, 19, was killed by a drunk driver Nov. 25, 1989, while getting into a car.
'It's something you can't even describe. I can still hear his voice, hear him laugh. I can still picture him walking through the door. Time doesn't mean anything.' Marian Stokes, whose son Michael, 16, was killed by a drunk driver July 11, 1981, while on his way to work.
'You go to the beach and there are kids everywhere. It bothers me looking at all the babies. It bothers me looking at pregnant women. I was pregnant, too. I was on the beach with a little toddler. I look at families and I wonder, will they make it? What are the odds? Look what could happen to them.' Cheryl Slocum, mother of 22-month-old Todd, killed by a drunken driver on Oct. 16, 1990, as he played in a yard.
Today, as legislators argue about the merits of actually punishing people who repeatedly drink and drive, Gordon and Donna Packer will be visiting their daughter Lacey's grave. Lacey was killed when she was 10 by a man with a long history of drunk driving. Her death led to a tightening of state law. Today is Lacey's birthday. She would have been 15. Her father and mother and brother would be taking her out to dinner tonight, watching her open presents, celebrating, enjoying the occasion, if a man who repeatedly drank and drove had been locked up before he killed.
But because the law gave him chance after chance after chance, they'll stand at her grave, instead, remembering her, missing her, weeping for the little girl they lost and for the teen-ager they never got to know.
