By Joe Gerrety
Journal and Courier - 4/29/99

The deaths of Sarah Towery and Chip Smith took only an instant. In the time it took a drunken driver to swerve across the center line, their hopes for the future ended.

And Sarah's parents watched it happen. So forgive them if they're not willing to wait for a police investigation to run its course.

Just five weeks after the fatal crash, Dan and Margie Towery of Lafayette filed a lawsuit against the estate of the man who caused their death and his own, against the bar where he allegedly got drunk, and against the bartender who served him.

The Towerys said Wednesday it's just one step in a series of actions they're taking so something positive come out of the deaths of Sarah and Chip.

Any money they gain from the lawsuit, they said, will go into a scholarship fund in Sarah's name at the University of Illinois-Springfield, where she was a student.

And despite their anger at Jeffrey A. Pedone Trout, the drunken driver who killed their daughter, and the people who allowed him to be on the road drunk March 21, they said some positives already have arisen from Sarah's death:

The Towerys plan to contact state legislators to propose stricter laws regarding repeat drunken-driving offenders and their access to vehicles. They'd also like to start a new MADD chapter in Lafayette.

That's the positive side.

There are still lots of negative thoughts that can easily consume the parents who watched their 24-year-old daughter die in a violent crash. There are the flashbacks that Dan has of the crash, the ambulance ride to the hospital and the anguished hours spent there.

There's dismay at the legal system that allowed Trout, a man three times convicted of drunken driving in Indiana, to have access to a vehicle registered in his own name.

And there's that feeling that what happened to Sarah wasn't just an accident. They consider it murder.

"It's not an accident. (Trout) may not have picked Chris and Sarah to kill, but when he turned the key in the ignition, it was intentional, said Margie Towery.

"There were a number of people who allowed him to be on that road in that condition that Sunday afternoon when he murdered Chip and Sarah."