A woman later discovered to be drinking alcohol while traveling down Jefferson Avenue in Newport News, Virginia (VA), caused a chain-reaction crash that left a city worker injured. Five vehicles were involved in the accident, which occurred in the middle of the morning on October 1, 2014.
According to the Daily Press, the at-fault driver got into a rear-end collision with the car being driven the public employee. The force of the impact pushed both cars across the median and into a line of cars on the other side of the street. The woman now faces multiple criminal charges for driving drunk and, because her 3-year-old grandson was riding with her, endangering a child by not using a safety seat.
As a longtime Virginia personal injury lawyer, I know this wreck could have produced much more severe injuries and, possibly, one or more deaths. We could all understandably be relieved that no one got hurt in ways that they could never recover and that most of the damage inflicted by the drinking driver’s negligence and recklessness happened to vehicles that can get repaired or replaced.
The lesson we need to learn from the wreck, however, is that taking the wheel while intoxicated puts everyone’s lives at unnecessary and unacceptable risk. Knowing that the woman exposed her own grandchild to those terrible possibilities and did not even take the precaution of strapping him into a safety seat should leave everyone troubled. As bad as DUI/DWI can be, endangering a young boy or girl should never be considered.
EJL