Lucy Tobias

I’d rather eat ten penny nails than go to a victim’s impact panel and listen to a lineup of broken people tell the story of how their life was forever changed by a drunk driver.

But a friend of mine asked me to go for support as she told her story, an ordeal she goes through every month the panel meets.

After promising to go, I put it off for months. Finally, I could put it off no longer. I went. Her story and the others broke my heart. These are tales of dreams destroyed. Get a tissue before you start reading one story, the story of Grace. You are going to need it.

In a photo taken just two hours before she died, Grace is smiling an angel’s smile, gurgling as only a toddler can do, her eyes full of love as she looks at her mom.

Her name is Grace Latimer Redgate. It is New Year’s Day, 2000, somewhere in South Florida. Grace is nine months old. She just had her first peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She had not yet taken her first step. In a stroller built for two, she goes for a walk, strapped in with her brother, Whitaker, 2 ½ years old. Mom is pushing the carriage.

“It is such a beautiful day, we went across a bridge to a park,” said Grace’s mom, Anna Redgate. On the way back over the bridge a drunk driver slammed into the 18-inch high guardrail, and hurtled over it.

“The stroller was ripped out of my hands,” Anna said. “I had just nursed her one half hour before. Now my baby was broken in two.” Miraculously, Whitaker survived, although Grace was severed and half of her body lay in his lap.

The drunk driver had a history of drunk driving arrests. He was a bitter, middle-aged man, estranged from his family, a man who could care less that he had been drinking and was driving.

“You can forgive the weakness in a person, but not the selfishness,” Anna said. As she talked, Anna stands at a table used by attorneys. This is a courtroom, turned over tonight to the victim’s impact panel. She held up pictures of Grace, and the same pictures filled a screen behind her.

The courtroom full of people is dead silent. You could hear a pin drop. All 63 people, from all walks of life, had to be here. It was mandatory. Part of their court-ordered sentence for being arrested for drunk driving. The whole point of listening to victims – to get the very clear message across not to drink and drive.

The victims do not preach. They simply describe their lives before, during and after.

“I’m still her mother,” Anna tells them. “I still want to take care of her but I don’t have that privilege. I never got to hear her say ‘mama’. I never got to see her take her first step.”

The Salvation Army’s Corrections Department in Marion County puts on these victim impact panels and has for 13 years.

Drunk driving is no accident. It is 100 percent preventable. Anna and the other speakers say telling the stories are therapy for them. I say it is an act of uncommon courage to bare their pain to total strangers.

But they hope for gain, for at least one person listening to change their lives. All people in the audience are required to fill out an evaluation form. Later, the victims sit in a jury conference room, reading them, looking for hope, for answers, for redemption.

To my surprise, a number of writers say they wonder why kids are not required to hear these victims, why not get to the teenage drivers, get to drivers when they are just starting out.

Great idea. High schools, are you listening? Forget the video in driver’s education class about not drinking and driving. Pack the class up and bring them to a victim’s impact panel. If that doesn’t drive home the message DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE, nothing will.

And do you drink? Lots of you are nodding. Look around at your friends. Do you know a designated driver, someone who doesn’t drink? Do you have friends who will tell you not to drive after drinking? If ‘yes’, you are blessed. If ‘no’, get new friends.

Grace would have been five years old this year. Anna planted a flowering tree in her memory. And she will be back next month, to tell Grace’s story again.

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To know more:

www.madd.org – Mothers Against Drunk Driving
www.saddonline.com – Students Against Drunk Driving
www.dui.com – state by state outline of DUI regulations and facts