Looking for someone to blame

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It shouldn't have happened. This is an unarguable fact. Julie Tobin, of West Roxbury, should be alive, not dead.

She was killed on Sept. 6, 1987. The 17-year-old had spent the afternoon at a family reunion of a friend held at Norwood Country Club. Shortly after midnight, she left the reunion on foot and was standing in the breakdown lane of Route 1 talking to some friends in a van when she suddenly ran around the front of the van and onto the road. She was hit by a car and died the next day.

At the time of the accident Tobin had a blood alcohol level of .20, twice the level at which a driver in Massachusetts is considered legally drunk.

Julie Tobin had been drinking all evening. Adults purchased her drinks at a bar outside the function room, then walked back into the hall and handed them to her.

After their daughter's death, the Tobins filed lawsuits against the adults who bought drinks for the underage girl and against Norwood Country Club. The first suit was settled out of court. Norwood Country Club opted for a trial.

Arthur Licata, attorney for the Tobins, based his case on the premise that the club should have known that drinks sold to adults would end up in the hands of minors. The bartenders should have monitored the function room, he told a jury. Because they didn't, Julie Tobin died.

A jury bought this argument and ordered the club to pay $510,000 to the Tobins for their daughter's wrongful death.

There's no question that Julie Tobin's death was full of wrong. It was wrong for adults who should have known better to ply this teenager with drinks. It was wrong for them to continue to buy her drinks, when according to Licata her drunkenness was "open and obvious." It was wrong for them to allow her to walk out of the function hall, into the dark, onto busy Route 1.

But was Norwood Country Club in the wrong? Should the club be held responsible for Julie Tobin's death?

Absolutely not.

"This decision should save the lives of kids attending functions where there's alcohol," Licata said last week. But this decision will not save lives. It may well lives, for it passes the buck and dilutes responsibility.

The adults who bought Julie Tobin's drinks are responsible for her death. She was a child. She was handed drink after drink after drink. The drinks took away her ability to be responsible for herself. The adults should have known better.

The argument that the bartenders should have known Julie Tobin was drinking is specious. It appeals to the heart. Who else can we blame? Who else could have saved her?

Reason asks, how could the bartenders have known? A guy comes up to a bar, buys a couple of drinks or a round and disappears. Should bartenders - at weddings and private parties where the crowd is mixed and young people mingle with older people - follow customers back to their tables, watch how and to whom the drinks are distributed, make sure that every person looks as if he can handle a drink, and when in doubt administer a sobriety test?

Isn't this expecting just a little too much of someone who is already mixing drinks, running tabs, making change and making sure everyone has been waited on? Are bartenders now to be analysts, police and judges, too?

If a man sits at a bar and a bartender continually refills his glass and the man leaves the bar drunk and ends up being killed or killing someone else, then the bartender shares the blame in the deaths.

But the Norwood judgment is a reach. It means that all clubs that rent out facilities to private parties are sitting ducks for lawsuits. They will either have to raise their rates and hire drink police to monitor patrons so that adults don't slip drinks to kids, or far simpler close their doors to everyone under 21.

It makes more sense to set up breathalyzers at exits so that no one who is drunk can leave alone. But we're not talking sense, here. We're talking lawsuits and settlements and looking for someone else to blame.