“Mista ...mista, you okay?” Those were the first and only words I heard coming through the bluesy fog of a dreamlike sleep. But my nightmare had just begun.
The music at the bar had been loud, so loud you could hardly hear the person talking to you. Was I still at the bar? Did I pass out? But there was no music and I was on my back. I was outside, cold, there was rain on my face.
“Mista, help is comin’, just lay still ..you be okay.”
Huh, wait a minute ...where am I? Oh, s**t, no, this didn’t happen ...oh, my God!
Sirens. Distant now loud. I’m in my car. I’m upside down. I must be hurt bad. Voices.
As my head started to clear I realized I was in a car accident. I’ve never been in one before so this was all new territory for me. Just lay still, wait for help, think about how this happened and start getting your story straight. Rainy icy roads.
Drinking. Yes, I was drinking, a lot. This is going to be bad.
The bar had one of those breath advisor kiosks on the wall near the restrooms where you could check your breath for alcohol content. I remember seeing it. There was an advertisement playing on the screen for a beer company, Miller/Coors I think, with a ‘drink responsibly’ tag at the bottom. How Ironic, I thought. The kiosk had straws so you could blow into the machine and get your BAC (breath alcohol content). Utah had just lowered its legal level from 0.08% to 0.05%, it was the first state in the nation to do this, but somehow I didn’t think this applied to me. I don’t know why I thought that. Stupid. I was blind drunk. I knew I shouldn’t drive. The kiosk even had a feature application that would have called a cab for me. The service was free.
The people I was with had all left, I think, and I just wanted to get home. I was in Park City, it was less than 20 minutes down the canyon to Salt Lake and home. I’d use the restroom, splash some cold water on my face and head out. The chances of getting stopped are slim, I’ll take the chance. Better than having to hassle around and come all the way back up here for my car.
The next voice I heard was a man’s voice. He told me not to move and that they needed to “cut” me out of the car. Cut? Oh, yeah, jaws of life machine. Huh, I thought, I probably should have used the breath advisor machine, would have saved a lot of trouble. Little did I know.
As my senses started coming back to me there in my car and as the mechanical jaws did their noisy, creaking work bending the metal that was entrapping me, my thoughts were on what was going to happen next. I was scared. I wasn’t sure how bad I was hurt, or even if I was hurt. I felt coherent and ok physically, probably as distortedly okay as I felt ignoring, rejecting, the critical life-saving services and subliminal warning by proximity of the breath advisor kiosk at the bar. I thought I’d probably be okay. I felt no pain, yet. I must have been in shock.
The shock was, when they pulled me out of the car my right leg didn’t come with me.
As it turned out, that was the least of my problem. I had veered off the canyon road coming down at an excessive speed and into the oncoming lane. I hit a car head-on. It was a family heading up to ski at Park City for the holidays. Three people were killed. The father, mother, and a 12-year-old daughter. The 17-year-old son was hospitalized in critical condition. My BAC was off the scale at 02.25%.
The next days, weeks and months were pure hell on top of agony. My leg. That poor family. My irresponsibility. Suicide is all I could think of ...but how? My life was over anyway, and I was directly responsible for destroying the lives of four people, a whole family, the boy died that night in the hospital. I didn’t care about my leg, I got off easy. I tried to convince myself that at least they were all still together, somewhere, but that thought was no comfort, only a constant pain in my soul and every fiber of my being for what I had done to them.
The outcome of this story is the story itself. You can imagine the legal ramifications of what happened to me next, not to mention the physical, financial, and personal pain and guilt for what I had done. The point is this ...if you have ever felt the stomach-churning, fearful dread and the constant, suffocating anxiety of knowing you could have easily prevented an accident like this, you know the hell in which I, and the friends and family of those people are living.
All I hear now, constantly, in the center of my mind, is that voice. “Mista ...mista, you okay?” It was the 12-year-old girl of that family who died. She had crawled from her dad’s vehicle to see if I was okay.
I could have easily prevented this hell. Our state governments, public safety and law enforcement officials work diligently to help us prevent tragedies like this. Science and technology create devices and sponsored marketing/detection equipment like breath advisor kiosks to help us prevent these tragedies.
Although this is a story of fiction, similar tragedies happen every day on Utah’s and the nation’s highways. In the end, we are a species of reason and free choice. Let’s try harder to use the brains and free will reasoning God gave us to make the right choices.
John Kushma is a communication consultant and lives in Logan, Utah.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-george-kushma-379a5762
http://newsbout.com/a/John+Kushma
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