Lessons on drinking and driving
PERSONAL LOSS: A FRIENDSHIP AND TRIAL
Jo Ross's life -- and death -- is a story wrapped up in grief, and graciousness, and the indelible consequences of driving while drunk.
By Brad Buchholz
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 18, 2008
My friend Jo Ross was killed on a sunny spring afternoon while driving to a church picnic to pick up her grandson. There's no way she could have seen it coming. Her light, on Steck Avenue, was green. The intersection ahead was clear. There was no way for Mrs. Ross to see the drunken driver in the Sequoia sport-utility vehicle as he was blazing down the MoPac Boulevard access road, oblivious to the red light in front of him.
The drunken driver — Thomas Dwain Reeves — was driving so fast, recalled one witness at his trial, that it seemed as if someone were chasing him. He was arguing with his wife the instant before impact, open beers in the front seat, empties all around, their young son riding in back. Blowing into the intersection, Reeves slammed into the passenger side of Mrs. Ross' silver sedan without leaving a skid mark. The collision, said one onlooker, was "like an explosion."
Mrs. Ross died hours later, at Brackenridge Hospital — and it breaks my heart, two years after the accident, to open a story about her life with the obscene circumstance of her death. But this is the way, I'm afraid, when drinking and driving ends in dying. It contorts everything. It steals life, distorts memory, throws the narrative of a loved one's journey completely out of balance.
For the full article, click HERE.
