Three times the legal limit.
That's how much alcohol
Chicago-area police say the driver of a
pickup truck had in his system Sunday
evening when he ran a red light and hit a
minivan carrying the Hockerman family of
West Lafayette.
The Hockermans had just
returned from a vacation overseas and were
driving away from a remote parking lot near
O'Hare Airport when Ralph Pollock, a
46-year-old Schaumburg, Ill., man, sailed
through the intersection. The fiery crash
took the lives of two of Greg and Sherry
Hockerman's three children -- Claire, 14,
and Nathan, 5.
Pollock, who police say
has a previous drunken driving arrest, was
left in a Chicago-are jail Tuesday with a $1
million bond. And a family was left to
grieve and cope with their own injuries.
And we're left with the
incomprehensible math of what was
unfathomable scene: Three times the legal
limit.
How many needless crashes
like this one will it take before drivers
get the fact that they are nothing less than
loaded weapons, indiscriminately putting
other lives on the line, when they get
behind the wheel after having too much to
drink?
Of course, for this
family, for their church, for their
classmates and for their coworkers, there
are no other crashes like this one. There
never are when a drunken driver takes a
life.
How hard is that to figure
out? How long does it take for that to sink
in?
Once again, family and
friends are burdened with a sad response --
too long -- from a driver who made the
undeserving pay for his own reckless
disregard.
