Drunk driver claims a victim

The Boston Herald

It is snowing and I am late, the traffic on Route 138 backed up for miles. When I arrive at New England Sinai Hospital, Laurie Kelly is gone because the traffic will make her late if she waits for me. She cannot be late. She has driven all the way from Monument Beach to Stoughton with her 6-year-old daughter so that the child can see with her own eyes that her father is still in the same room, in the same hospital bed, where he was yesterday, and the day before yesterday and dozens of days before that.

Now she must drive the child into Boston so the little girl can meet with a psychiatrist who will try to assure her that her father is alive and doing well.

"He is doing amazingly well," Laurie Kelly says about her husband, Tom. "But it's a fight, a constant battle."

On Oct. 28 Tom Kelly, 34, strapped his daughter Melissa into his car, buckled his own seatbelt and headed down Route 28 for the short drive to Middleboro to meet his father for dinner. They never made it. Just outside Middleboro Center, a drunken driver crossed the center line and smashed into them. The drunken driver was killed. Tom Kelly was severely injured. Melissa was pinned under the dashboard. She never lost consciousness so she saw the other driver's body land on their windshield. She saw her father's sneakers fly off. She saw her father's head hit the steering wheel three times, and then she heard him choking on his own blood.

"I tried to pick up Daddy's head," she told her mother, but her arm was stuck and she couldn't reach him.

"She thought he had died," her mother explains.

Now, every day after school Melissa goes to the hospital so she can see that he's not dead. The few times she missed, the few times snow kept her away, she didn't sleep. She doesn't sleep much anyway. Since the night of the crash she has been living with the fear that when she gets to the hospital her father won't be there.

On this day Tom Kelly is sitting in a wheelchair, his back to the door. His left foot is bound and extended straight in front of him. He hears a visitor's footsteps, assumes they are those of his nurse and says without looking up, "I just want to go to bed. Please. I just want to go to bed." He is young and handsome. He is also tired and broken. "I just want to go to bed," he continues. "I don't want to be a bad guest. I just want to go to bed."

He can speak. He recognizes his family and friends. He realizes what has happened to him. He tells himself and everyone else that he will get better, just wait and see.

And he is getting better. Laurie says that every now and then she gets a glimpse of who he used to be. But he doesn't have much physical strength. His left side is paralyzed, and he has leg and hip problems, a crushed ankle and intestinal problems. But all these things are minor compared to the head injury that kept him in a coma for eight weeks and that is keeping him in a mental limbo now. "I just want to be Tom. I just want to be Tom again," he tells Laurie.

"I've been with Tom since I was 19," she says. "I love him. I'll take care of him. No drunk driver is going to take him away from me."

But the drunk driver already has.