A drunken driver claims another life

The Boston Herald
Beverly Beckham

I write words and the words mean nothing, because I write about what's here and not what isn't here. And it's the void, the emptiness, that is the story.

A man and a woman sit in the living room of their immaculate suburban home. On a table there are ceramic sneakers. On the couch there is a stuffed dog. Underneath the coffee table there is a real dog, a basset hound. On the walls there are pictures, and on the credenza more pictures.

None of these things matters. They are weights which keep the people from floating away. They are props from a play long closed.

The girl in all the pictures, their daughter, was killed 18 months ago. She was 20, a junior in college, bright, bubbly, beautiful. She was killed by a 52 year-old-man who staggered into a bar, loud and boisterous, but who was served at least four more drinks anyway, by a bartender who knew the man was an alcoholic. No one in the bar tried to stop this man even though witnesses say he stumbled out the door and fell into his car, even though he was seen weaving his way home.

He never saw Kristen Hatch, her long blond hair, her white jogging suit, running, not in the breakdown lane but along the dirt shoulder of a two-lane road. He never noticed David and Joan Hatch's only child whom they had protected for 20 years. He thought he'd hit something. That's what he told the police. But he didn't know what he'd hit and he didn't know where.

Two weeks ago, the bar that served Edward O'Brien, Parente's Family Restaurant in Smithfield, R.I., agreed to an out-of court settlement that gave Kristen Hatch's mother, who is the administrator of her estate, $1 million. The Hatches plan to use the money to fund scholarships for students at Mansfield High, where Kristen was graduated from, at Bryant College in Rhode Island, where she was a marketing major and in the town of Smithfield, where the Hatches have been supported by strangers who have rallied to their side.

But the money can't buy the only thing the Hatches want. It can't bring back their daughter.

They had to go to the morgue to identify her body.

"You look through a window at your child on a cot," David Hatch says, his voice steady but pained. "She is covered in a red blanket up to her neck and she looks like she is sleeping, but she's not. And you want to go in there and you want to kiss her on the cheek like they do in the movies and you want to wake her up, but you can't. And you think how she was born perfect and how she didn't die at birth and how she didn't suffer crib death. How, when she fell off her bike, you put on a Band-Aid and sent her off again, how you used to fix her car, and how you can't fix this.

"On the news, after she was killed, they showed a stretcher being pulled out of a gully. On the stretcher was a body bag. I looked and I thought: my baby's in that bag. I said, that's Kristen. But I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. She was our whole life."

The criminal trial against Edward O'Brien, who was charged again with drunken driving three months Kristen's death, has yet to begin. He's still walking around a free man. A civil case has cost him his condominium, however.

"People say, you already have $1 million, why are you taking this poor man's home?" Joan Hatch says. "Because we want other people who drink and drive to realize that even though they don't respect life, even though they don't care about the lives they destroy, they probably respect their own property. If they're aware that they can lose what they own, maybe then they won't drink and drive."

If they're aware that they can lose what they own, maybe then they won't drink and drive

If they were forced to feel for just one minute what David and Joan Hatch feel every minute of their lives, they wouldn't think about drinking and driving.

"I'd like to go away and forget everything and not have any memory," David Hatch says. "I'd like to erase myself. Evaporate. I wish I had never existed, never married, never had a child. This is just too hard. I never thought that life could be so cruel.

"It's like when I was 8 years old, I took a short cut home from school. I thought I knew the way down a small, narrow path. But it wasn't a path at all, and I got lost. I remember the fear in my stomach, the sinking feeling that I would never get home again, that I would never be safe, that I would wander around lost forever. That's what's it's like for me every day. Without Kristen I'm lost and unable to get home."