A 13-year-old from Northampton County, North Carolina (NC), is facing a driving while intoxicated charge after causing a head-on collision near the town of Woodland on March 3, 2012. According to police, the teen was supplied with alcohol at a party before getting behind the wheel of a car, driving down Highway 35 without turning on the vehicle’s headlight and ramming into another car.
The drunk driving crash left the girl and two people in the other vehicle with injuries requiring hospital treatment. A 23-year-old man from Murfreesboro, NC, has been charged with giving the teenager beer and other malt beverages.
The driver and passenger in the struck car are expected to make full recoveries, as is the at-fault drunk teen driver.
So much appears to have gone wrong leading up to the head-on collision in rural northeastern North Carolina. A middle school-aged child was driving while intoxicated on alcohol supplied by an adult who should have known better. Then the young teen who had no license was allowed to drive. It is not surprising to learn that the unqualified and inexperienced driver compounded her first crime and mistake of driving drunk by failing to turn on the car’s headlights. The crash that hospitalized three people seems an inevitability.
As North Carolina personal injury attorneys, we know that DWI accidents shatter victims’ lives. No adult should ever drive after drinking too much, And certainly, no teen too young to even hold a driver’s license should ever drink at all, let alone drive drunk.
EJL