Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Drunk Driver: Finality of Death: Five-Year Sentence:

What could possibly be more painful than looking in as a silent witness to the agony of a family that has lost a loved one? In this instance, a young woman, hardly more than a girl, whose life was taken in a dreadful accident on the very cusp of her family's rural property. A beautiful young girl whose parents and younger sister could never, ever have imagined being deprived of her presence in their lives.

Anguishing enough to be informed of the death of a young person, in a more impersonal way, by an official dispatched from an accident scene, a police officer whose duty it would be to knock at a family door and inform those inside that a dreadful accident had occurred, and it is is their child, their sister, whose presence has evaporated from the land of the living. But in this particular instance it was not like that at all.

A family living in the Petawawa area became aware of a crash and commotion outside their home, just beyond their driveway, on the road that runs by their home. Rushing outside to see a vehicle smashed, and in flames. Unable to recognize the vehicle as their own. Unable to conceive at first that it is their child in that vehicle, clinging to life, being eaten by flames. Then stricken with reality.

Responding, rushing to the scene, with the full realization dawning that their 17-year-old daughter sat in that inferno, desperately attempting to reach her, free her, rescue her from certain death. Mother being held back by neighbours trying to put out the flames, and the father desperate to give his daughter comfort, agonizingly screaming out his love for her.

Death would not be foiled, and they became witness to their child's departure from life. And the cause? A young woman, a decade older than their daughter, driving intoxicated, over twice the legal limit, driving recklessly, a hazard to all other drivers on the roads she sped through, all of whom managed to evade her, while contacting authorities to warn of her dangerous presence.

The only one who could not evade her was the daughter, the young woman, waiting for traffic to clear so she could safely turn into her driveway.

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