Meeting by Accident- Such a sad story.
This will be a very sad story about two beautiful and good people who met by accident. One person is a 16 year-old male student, and devout Seventh-Day Adventist who had been attending a religious rally on the day in question. He was on his way home riding his moped when he met the lady.
The lady was a 37year-old woman who held a job of great significance, and was a person who provided voluntary service to the community. On the day in question she spent the afternoon and evening at a downtown hotel, presumably with at least one friend, but probably with friends where she had copious amounts of alcohol to drink that put her two and a half times over the legal driving limit when she got in her car to drive home.
I will pause here to point out that in a society that I will describe as being a liquid one, in that people habitually drink to excess, it is not all that unusual for people to do as this young woman did, and the road death toll reflects this. It just means that the lessons are yet to be learned and a lot of people will die needlessly in the future until the penny drops.
To return to our story, as this lady “drove” her car fate brought the two people together. Our imaginations would need to work overtime to calculate the number of people she missed along the six-mile course she had travelled until she reached this point. Her car crossed over into the oncoming lane and ran headlong into a stone-wall and flipped over, landing on top of the moped and rider. It continued on and flipped again landing again on its roof. The woman was pulled from the car and taken to hospital, by ambulance, where it was determined she was suffering from minor injuries to her hand and leg.
It was only later that the young man was discovered in a very grave state. She had no idea that she had hit someone. This is what her afternoon of drinking and then driving inadvertently caused::
v He was found barely clinging to life.
v He suffered damaging head wounds and concussion that have left him with permanent intellectual deficit and memory loss.
v He sustained fractures to his jaw, collarbone, and hip.
v He suffered two broken legs.
v His wrist was broken.
v His lungs were damaged causing him respiratory pain and difficulty in breathing.
v He suffered lacerations to other parts of his body, too numerous to mention.
v He has spent three months in the local hospital, and a further month in an overseas rehabilitation clinic.
v He was a good and promising sportsman, but he will never be able to return to sports.
v His future is uncertain.
Her only defence was that she was totally drunk at the time she dropped her car on top of him.
The Court had some difficulty in dealing with the case because she is fundamentally a model citizen, (which is not to say that she had never driven before while impaired by alcohol), but she had no prior convictions against her for anything.. She is a very beautiful woman and no-one took any pleasure in sending her to jail. She realises the seriousness of her actions, and I think that when she is released from prison in one year’s time she will try and help her victim in any way that she can. I also hope that she will receive all the help that she needs to try and pull her life back together.
Her life is ruined in the country where this incident took place. It is also probably ruined in her own mind. She appears to be a person of conscience so will never be able to run away from herself. She said in open court that she hopes her story will resonate within the community so that people learn from it. The judge told her “despite all the good deeds you may perform, it only takes a moment to destroy it all.”
Her lawyer, whose job was to minimize her penalty, said that he hoped that any jail sentence would be suspended due to the mitigating circumstances of the case.
Such as?
This story certainly resonates with me. It could have been my own story as so many times my car drove itself home in my mad days. I was lucky that we managed to avoid gathering any victims, but that is in itself an accident.
The moral of the story is: “Be Responsible. Drink alcohol OR drive. Not both!”
This is just such a sad story. Take care it doesn’t become your own story.
Copyright © 2011 Eugene Carmichael
This will be a very sad story about two beautiful and good people who met by accident. One person is a 16 year-old male student, and devout Seventh-Day Adventist who had been attending a religious rally on the day in question. He was on his way home riding his moped when he met the lady.
The lady was a 37year-old woman who held a job of great significance, and was a person who provided voluntary service to the community. On the day in question she spent the afternoon and evening at a downtown hotel, presumably with at least one friend, but probably with friends where she had copious amounts of alcohol to drink that put her two and a half times over the legal driving limit when she got in her car to drive home.
I will pause here to point out that in a society that I will describe as being a liquid one, in that people habitually drink to excess, it is not all that unusual for people to do as this young woman did, and the road death toll reflects this. It just means that the lessons are yet to be learned and a lot of people will die needlessly in the future until the penny drops.
To return to our story, as this lady “drove” her car fate brought the two people together. Our imaginations would need to work overtime to calculate the number of people she missed along the six-mile course she had travelled until she reached this point. Her car crossed over into the oncoming lane and ran headlong into a stone-wall and flipped over, landing on top of the moped and rider. It continued on and flipped again landing again on its roof. The woman was pulled from the car and taken to hospital, by ambulance, where it was determined she was suffering from minor injuries to her hand and leg.
It was only later that the young man was discovered in a very grave state. She had no idea that she had hit someone. This is what her afternoon of drinking and then driving inadvertently caused::
v He was found barely clinging to life.
v He suffered damaging head wounds and concussion that have left him with permanent intellectual deficit and memory loss.
v He sustained fractures to his jaw, collarbone, and hip.
v He suffered two broken legs.
v His wrist was broken.
v His lungs were damaged causing him respiratory pain and difficulty in breathing.
v He suffered lacerations to other parts of his body, too numerous to mention.
v He has spent three months in the local hospital, and a further month in an overseas rehabilitation clinic.
v He was a good and promising sportsman, but he will never be able to return to sports.
v His future is uncertain.
Her only defence was that she was totally drunk at the time she dropped her car on top of him.
The Court had some difficulty in dealing with the case because she is fundamentally a model citizen, (which is not to say that she had never driven before while impaired by alcohol), but she had no prior convictions against her for anything.. She is a very beautiful woman and no-one took any pleasure in sending her to jail. She realises the seriousness of her actions, and I think that when she is released from prison in one year’s time she will try and help her victim in any way that she can. I also hope that she will receive all the help that she needs to try and pull her life back together.
Her life is ruined in the country where this incident took place. It is also probably ruined in her own mind. She appears to be a person of conscience so will never be able to run away from herself. She said in open court that she hopes her story will resonate within the community so that people learn from it. The judge told her “despite all the good deeds you may perform, it only takes a moment to destroy it all.”
Her lawyer, whose job was to minimize her penalty, said that he hoped that any jail sentence would be suspended due to the mitigating circumstances of the case.
Such as?
This story certainly resonates with me. It could have been my own story as so many times my car drove itself home in my mad days. I was lucky that we managed to avoid gathering any victims, but that is in itself an accident.
The moral of the story is: “Be Responsible. Drink alcohol OR drive. Not both!”
This is just such a sad story. Take care it doesn’t become your own story.
Copyright © 2011 Eugene Carmichael
