Alcohol involved in nearly 40% of fatalities in state

By Jeff Parrott
Journal and Courier - 10/10/99

Their frequency almost has become numbing.

Week after week, the pages of the Journal and Courier contain stories of tragedy caused by drinking and driving. No tragedy is more frustrating to report than the preventable, such as when someone chooses to get behind the wheel after drinking too much alcohol.

In Greater Lafayette and across the nation, the lives of fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends and co-workers are ending abruptly, violently and for no reason because someone drove drunk.

Judging from the national statistics, efforts to combat drunken driving - such as tougher laws and public awareness campaigns - seem to be making progress.

Last year, the number of people killed in alcohol-related crashes in the United States dropped to a record low. Nearly 16,000 traffic deaths, or 38.4 percent, involved alcohol, according to estimates made by the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Indiana numbers also show improvement. From 1989 through last year, the yearly number of alcohol-related traffic deaths fell 16 percent, from 451 to 379. Matching the national average, 38.7 percent of traffic fatalities last year involved alcohol, according to the estimates.

Despite more enforcement and sobriety checkpoints, annual drunken driving arrests made by the Indiana State Police fell 30 percent from 1989 to 1998, from 8,917 to 6,227. (That figure peaked at 12,254 in 1986).

While these trends are encouraging, the fact remains that in Indiana during that decade, an estimated 3,833 people lost their lives in alcohol-related wrecks.

Can't Hoosiers do better?

Locally, some recent high-profile drunken-driving fatalities have kept the issue in the spotlight. Many in the community mourned the July 31 death in Gary of Tiffany Young, the 21-year-old Purdue women's basketball player killed when the car in which she was riding, her boyfriend's, was struck by one driven by an alleged drunken driver.

Four months earlier, 24-year-old Sarah Towery and her boyfriend, Chip Smith, 20, were killed in Lafayette when their car was hit head-on by one driven by Jeffrey Trout, who police say had had 10 alcoholic drinks at the Mirage, a local bar, that afternoon. The bar subsequently lost its license to sell alcohol and now faces a lawsuit from the victims' families, a case that local bar and restaurant owners say they're watching closely.

Today and Monday, this special report, OWI: The Price of Drinking and Driving, is the Journal and Courier's attempt to open your eyes to the ongoing crisis of drunken driving.

MEMORIAL MISSION: Margie and Dan Towery pose by crosses where their daughter, Sarah, and her boyfriend, Chip Smith, were killed by a drunken driver last March. The Towerys have composed an 11-point initiative that they plan to share with state legislators and judges to help prevent more drunken driving deaths. Photo by Michael Heinz/Journal and Courier.