LouLife

It’s just before midnight on a hot, close Friday night. Indiana State Trooper Chris Keeton sits in his patrol car and, like an alert cat, eyes focused on one spot, watches and waits.

Indiana State Trooper Chris Keaton sizes up a young speeder for signs of alcohol impairment.

Keeton patrols the north bank of the Ohio River, knowing that drunk drivers leaving downtown Louisville and Fourth Street Live on their way back to Indiana have only one option besides the Kennedy and Sherman Minton bridges for getting home. Poised at the foot of the Clark Memorial (Second Street) Bridge in Jeffersonville, whose speed limit is 35 mph, he looks for traffic violations — speeding, crossing the center line, not using a turn signal — things that might indicate impaired driving. When a Jeep leaves the bridge at 48 mph, Keeton flies in pursuit, patrol lights flashing. In a moment he’s pulled the SUV over. He walks up to the driver’s side door and talks to the driver; then, in a minute, Keeton slides back into his patrol car. “Driver’s underage. (And) somebody in the car’s been drinking,” he says.

Soon, he guides a clean-cut young man out of the Jeep. Keeton administers a field sobriety test: The 20-year-old stands on one leg, balancing for several seconds. He walks a line up and back, arms at his sides. He follows with his eyes a light that Keeton moves back and forth. It’s the portable Breathalyzer test that does it. The college student blows 0.09 percent, over the federally established 0.08 percent legal limit for blood alcohol concentration (BAC) while driving. Keeton pulls a pair of handcuffs from his belt.    

Patrols like Keeton’s are the first line of defense in getting drunk drivers off the road. Still, each year in this country, an average of 17,000 people are killed in alcohol-related crashes, roughly 40 percent of all traffic deaths. Alcohol-impaired drivers kill someone in the U.S.every 31 minutes and injure someone every two. Experts say these crashes cost more than 51 billion dollars annually.

While any impairment — even at lower concentrations of alcohol in the blood — can lead to crashes, experts say it’s drivers over 0.08 percent BAC who are by far the most dangerous. More than 13,000 of the 17,602 alcohol-related fatalities recorded in 2006 involved drivers or motorcycle operators with blood alcohol levels at or above the legal limit. 

The fact that, despite the morbid statistics, people continue to drive drunk paints a portrait of a society with attitudes about alcohol still in transition, with its consciousness blurred by the cycling of priority issues, and with its resources pulled in multiple directions.

Before the 1980s, people often joked and laughed about “driving under the influence” (DUI). Jefferson County Attorney Irv Maze remembers a time growing up that people discussed drunk-driving incidents with a wink and a nod. Many, he says, considered it “a rite of passage.” Statistics reflected that attitude: In 1982, according to National Highway Safety Administration figures, 26,173 people — 60 percent of all crashes  — were killed by drunk drivers. A decade later the percentage would shrink to 47 percent.

In fact, says Angela Criswell, executive director of the Kentucky chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), “previously, if you drove drunk and had a crash, being drunk was (presented as) a mitigating factor — that you didn’t int/files/storyimages/to do it; it was accidental. People didn’t understand that the choice to drive drunk was in itself a crime.”

In 1980, Candy Lightner’s 13-year-old daughter Cari was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver as she walked in a suburban neighborhood in California. Lightner went on to found and organize MADD and to catalyze changes in public attitudes about drunk driving. She was joined by other groups and advocates, and new federal and state laws were pushed through regarding driving under the influence. Between 1982 and 1999, traffic fatalities involving alcohol decreased nearly 40 percent. But progress since then has been elusive, with the number of fatalities remaining near the aforementioned 17,000 a year for the last several years. The number of injuries hovers near 250,000.

“It’s been a plateau,” says Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, “and everybody is very worried about that.”

The idea that we’ve entered a period of complacency about drunk driving scares Karolyn Nunnallee, a former MADD national president who lost a daughter 19 years ago in a bus crash caused by a drunk driver. “It saddens my heart,” she says. “Maybe eight years ago, the public attitude had changed. But we’re seeing a new generation of drunk drivers that don’t see the danger.”

The most recent figures available — from 2005 to 2006 — show deaths resulting from drunk driving actually went up nearly 3 percent and were at the highest level since 1992, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Too early to call it a trend, experts say, but a far cry from the elimination of drunk driving that activists and public-safety officials had hoped for by now.

For Nunnallee, 56, statistics turned into personal tragedy on May 14, 1988, when Larry Mahoney, his blood alcohol concentration at 0.24 percent, drove his pickup truck the wrong way on Interstate 71 near Carrollton, Ky., and crashed into a church bus returning to Radcliff, Ky., from a day at King’s Island amusement park. The bus gas tank was punctured and exploded. Twenty-four children and three adults were killed. One of Nunnallee’s two children was on the trip.

“At the time of the crash, I was in Florida,” she says. “My mother was in the hospital and had come home. I left my husband in charge of our two daughters, Patty and Jeanne. I had spoken to him Saturday night and all was right with the world at that time. Sunday morning was just normal. I woke up and went to church with my nieces and nephews, took them out to lunch. Back at my parent’s home, I noticed my in-laws’ car was there and I thought, it’s just a typical Sunday; they’re out for a drive. When I walked in the house, I looked at my father, and the look on his face . . . I thought my mother had died. I knew something was wrong. My father-in-law stood up and said, ‘Karolyn, there’s been an accident.’

“Patty was 10, the youngest child on the bus. We were not members of that church, but she was asked to go on the trip with Jill, her best friend. Her mother was a chaperone on the trip. I didn’t get many details at the time, other than there had been a crash, the driver that had crashed into the bus had survived, and there had been multiple deaths. I flew back that night to Kentucky, got in very late the next morning, which would have been Monday morning. And I remember watching the news on television. It had a rolling list of the names of those killed in the crash, and Patty’s name was on it.

“Certainly first there is disbelief. And then when reality finally seeps in, there is anger. It was the deadliest bus crash in the history of our nation and it was the deadliest drunk-driving crash. I can’t remember if it was my father-in-law who said it or if I heard it on the news, but I knew early on that alcohol had been a factor in the crash. We all had heard about MADD, but I had no idea of the number of alcohol-related crashes that occur on our roadways. I just thought, why would anybody drink and drive? I lived in a bubble.

“Two weeks after the crash, I remember sitting at home by myself in the middle of the room, just totally in darkness — just really lost, and thinking, how can I go on? And I remember seeing the president of the local MADD chapter on television, and I just sat and thought, if things were reversed, if Patty had been the one that survived and I was killed, what would she do? She wouldn’t sit there. So I thought, I need to take action. And I went down to the local president of the MADD chapter and walked in and I said, ‘My name is Karolyn Nunnallee and I’m here to stop drunk driving.’” (Nunnallee has been involved with MADD for two decades, was its national president in 1998-99, and remains a victim advocate.)

Alcohol — technically, ethanol — is present in fermented and distilled liquors. It is a strong central nervous system depressant. Typically, a little bit of drinking leads to a feeling of relaxation. More consumption often leads to a lowering of inhibitions and some loss of coordination. Excessive drinking can cause slurred speech, blurred vision, extreme loss of coordination and even unconsciousness and death.  

In all 50 states, the legal limit for blood alcohol concentration while operating a motor vehicle is 0.08 percent. Though some defense attorneys say the limit should be raised to 0.10 percent, both the American Medical Association and MADD say it should be lowered to 0.05 percent. A BAC level of 0.08 percent is considered presumptive evidence of driving while intoxicated. All states also prohibit so-called “open containers,” trying to limit alcohol consumption in the passenger compartment of motor vehicles, and all states have repeat-offender statutes, which assess stronger penalties with each subsequent DUI. 

Just what type of person decides to drive drunk? Is there some sort of profile of the average drunk driver? Experts say no, that drunk drivers comprise both genders, all age groups, any ethnicity and all socio-economic classes. “You can’t profile because you don’t know who it’s going to be,” says Sgt. Todd Shaw of the Louisville Metro Police’s traffic division. He says he breaks those who drink and drive into two categories — the “habituals,” who routinely drink and drive, thinking it’s no big deal, that they aren’t going to hurt anyone; and the people Shaw calls the “ones that goof up,” who don’t drive drunk routinely but who miscalculate, ending up more intoxicated than they realize and not planning for a sober driver. 

While the law treats “first offenders” more harshly than it used to, the toughest sanctions are reserved for repeat offenders, who can /files/storyimages/up charged with a felony and, if convicted, can serve several months in jail and lose their license for years. That’s because a third of all DUI arrests each year are of people previously convicted of DUI. These offenders have not responded to the first or second round of penalties and, often, are heavy drinkers who get behind the wheel with BAC levels way beyond 0.08. According to MADD, 58 percent of alcohol-related fatalities involve someone with a BAC of 0.15 or higher.  

Though drunk drivers cross all categories, the Centers for Disease Control reports that

“(In past decades), if you drove drunk and had a crash, being drunk was (presented as) a mitigating factor — that you didn’t int/files/storyimages/to do it; it was accidental. People didn’t understand that the choice to drive drunk was in itself a crime.” -Angela Criswell

After the young Hoosier driver fails the portable Breathalyzer test, Chris Keeton takes him to the Clark County Jail for a second Breathalyzer test. While they wait, another trooper tests a motorcyclist pulled over after a day at the Kentucky State Fair. He tests 0.16 and is taken out for booking. Keeton looks at the student. “If you weren’t drinking,” he tells him, “you would have been given a warning and gone on down the road. What got you here was the drunk test.”

The young man is distressed. It’s a tough experience he’s facing. He’s on scholarship and is worried about what his parents will do. This time, he tests at 0.07 percent — under the legal limit for drunk driving but over the 0.02 percent limit for underage drinking and driving. The young man starts crying. “I lost one of my best friends to drunk driving two years ago,” he says.

Keeton decides not to press “minor consumption” and takes the 20-year-old home. “He’s not a bad kid,” the trooper says later, hoping that he’s taught an important lesson. 

To help address underage drinking and driving in Louisville, the office of County Attorney Maze offers an intervention program for first-time adolescent offenders. The program, called the KIDD DUI Diversion Program, is a collaboration among the county attorney’s office, the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office, the Louisville chapter of MADD and the University of Louisville Emergency Medicine Department. It includes such sobering requirements as a visit to the county morgue and autopsy room.     

Maze’s office — which has taken a tough stance on DUI and boasts a conviction rate near 100 percent — also offers a DUI diversion program to adults. It’s only for first-time offenders who meet certain criteria, including no previous arrests, a BAC level below 0.15 at the time of arrest and cooperation during the DUI pull-over.

In May of 2006, a 29-year-old Louisville resident completed the county DUI diversion program. Here’s his account of his arrest and its follow-up, given after we agreed to his request for anonymity:

“My night started out just celebrating a friend’s birthday. We all rented a limousine so no one would have to drive. We hopped around to a few different bars. There wasn’t very much hard liquor involved; mostly it was beer, maybe a few shots. At the /files/storyimages/of the night, which was 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, we all got back in the limo and got a ride to our friend’s house. I’d probably say (over the course of the evening I had) 10 beers. I hadn’t had anything to drink for the last hour and a half before we left the bar.

“We got something to eat. We hung out for a while. Everybody was supposed to stay there, but for some reason or another everybody decided, ‘OK, we’ve kind of had enough here.’ Everybody seemed OK to drive, so we all left. And that was the biggest mistake. I was with two other friends and I got pulled over on Interstate 64. That was the night all the construction had started. I think the speed limit had dropped down to 45 and I thought it was 55. At that point I was doing 62 miles an hour. (The officer) came up and talked to me, and I’d say within a minute he asked me to step out of the vehicle and to the rear. Then he proceeded to give me a sobriety test (including) a Breathalyzer. At that point I was 0.13. He said he was placing me under arrest for driving while intoxicated. My car got impounded and I went to jail.

“(I was feeling) disappointment, that I should have known better than to do what I did. Fortunately in my case, no one got hurt. When you do something like that, it’s like playing an odds game not only with your life but with everyone else’s. I definitely didn’t drink every day. It was more or less on weekends with friends. I can recall a few times when I had been behind the wheel and probably shouldn’t have been. It’s kind of like an invulnerability; it’s never going to happen to you. But eventually something will happen and it will all catch up to you.

Before the 1980s, people often joked and laughed about “driving under the influence.”   Jefferson County Attorney Irv Maze remembers a time growing up that people discussed drunk-driving incidents with a wink and a nod. Many, he says, considered it “a rite of passage.”

“What you have to do is voluntarily give up your license for 30 days. It is asked of you that you don’t give out information (about who) you might have seen in the program. You have to do 40 hours of community service. I worked for the American Red Cross and I also worked for Goodwill. You (also) att/files/storyimages/an impact session. A Jeffersontown police officer came and talked to us about some of the DUI scenes he’s been on where there’s been injuries or fatalities. The county coroner will actually talk to you. And somebody from Mothers Against Drunk Driving told her story about how she lost her grandson to a DUI accident.

“I have stopped drinking. Since my arrest for DUI, I have not had anything to drink. That is my plan — I’d just as soon take out that variable and not even have it anymore. I’m just glad that in my case, no one was injured, no one was killed. You realize that this happens a lot. It happens on a daily basis throughout the country. I really did make a big mistake in getting behind the wheel.”

In Indiana (and many other states), it’s mandatory that bars and restaurants serving alcohol train servers in how to spot intoxication and when to stop bringing drinks, avoiding what they call “overserving.” So-called Responsible Beverage Service Training programs are not mandatory in Kentucky, though cities can pass local ordinances requiring them. Bowling Green and Lexington have. Louisville has not.

 Greg Hoban, the assistant general manager of O’Shea’s Traditional Irish Pub on Bardstown Road, says he sees two types of drinkers — those who “are out to enjoy themselves,” who take their time with drinks, “and there are people who are asking for new ones (drinks) every 30 seconds and who come in specifically to get drunk,” he says. O’Shea’s trains its servers to spot intoxication, but Hoban acknowledges that it’s not until someone gets to a certain stage where their outward behavior changes markedly that a server might know that someone has had too much to drink to drive safely — the aggressive patron who is fumbling for keys, talking loudly or who has slurred speech. “We’ve got cabs lined up and we’ll load them into one of those,” he says. 

State-by-state “dram shop” liability laws hold an alcohol service establishment responsible if it continues to serve a patron who then drives intoxicated and injures or kills someone in a crash. (Dram shop is a reference to colonial times when taverns — shops — served spirits using “drams,” a unit of liquid measurement.) Indiana’s Excise Police laws simply say that “it is a criminal offense to sell or furnish alcoholic beverages to an intoxicated person.” Kentucky law specifically prohibits providing alcohol to 1) “a person actually or apparently under the influence of alcoholic beverages” or “anyone known to the seller or server to be a habitual drunkard or . . . to have been convicted of drunkenness as many as three times within the most recent 12-month period.”       

On July 9, 2002, just after 10:30 p.m., Prospect homebuilder Mark Eberenz, 42, driving with a BAC of 0.254 percent, crashed into a car carrying high school students Jamie Parsley and Cory Stauble, both 16. Ebernez reportedly had been drinking since noon that day. All three were killed in the crash. In June 2003 the Parsley and Stauble families, who had sued chain restaurant TGI Friday’s and a second local establishment that had served Ebernez alcohol, settled out of court. The families were awarded $21 million. The families made the settlement public hoping the huge sum would force other restaurants and bars to take “overserving” seriously. 

Currently, a similar suit against Phoenix Hill Tavern on Baxter Avenue is pending. Louisvillian Teresa Wilson’s husband Robert was killed by a drunk driver in 2006. Her suit claims the drunk driver of the other vehicle, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison last January, was sold drinks even though he was intoxicated.  

Those involved in the campaign to stop drunk driving say their fight needs more resources to succeed. As important as programs for such matters as domestic violence, community-oriented policing, and safeguarding airports and bridges are, they say, they can drain scarce public dollars and strained law enforcement resources away from the effort to get drunk drivers off the road. “I think we’re cyclical,” says Sgt. Shaw, noting that the Traffic Alcohol Program (TAP) once drew a lot of funding and other programs had to wait their turn. Now homeland security and aggressive-driving measures are taking precedence.

Nonetheless, at the /files/storyimages/of this past summer, both Kentucky and Indiana joined a national campaign called “Drunk Driving: Over the Limit, Under Arrest,” aimed at enforcing the 0.08 BAC legal limit. The campaign used sobriety checkpoints, saturation patrols and media spots to enforce the limit in the weeks leading up to Labor Day and will kick in again in December. These “mobilizations” are effective, says the Governors Highway Safety Association’s Harsha, “but there are not adequate resources to ensure that law enforcement can address impaired driving between mobilizations.”    

Activists in the fight say technology holds great promise in potentially keeping drunk drivers off the roads. Ignition interlocks, a Breathalyzer-type device that measures a driver’s blood alcohol concentration and locks a car’s ignition if it’s too high, are already in use in 45 states as a requirement or an option after a drunk-driving arrest. In development are passive devices that will unobtrusively measure the presence of alcohol in a car — perhaps as the would-be driver puts a hand on the wheel. If alcohol above a low level is detected, the device would lock down the car’s ignition.   

In the meantime, campaigns like this summer’s “Over the Limit, Under Arrest” will continue, groups like MADD will push for stricter legislation and mandatory ignition interlocks, and law enforcement officers like Indiana trooper Chris Keeton will sit in wait, watching.

Freelance writer Cameron Lawrence may be reached at editorial@loumag.com.

Building BAC

As I delved into the research for this article, I talked to friends about it, and over and over I heard that, while they didn’t want to drive drunk, many had little idea how to correlate how much they drank with their blood alcohol concentration (BAC). In all 50 states, it’s illegal to operate a motor vehicle with a BAC of 0.08 percent or above, a level generally correlated with beyond-a-doubt impairment. In many states, including Kentucky, a lower BAC level (0.05 percent) combined with erratic driving is enough to lead to a DUI conviction. 

I also wondered how much I might consume before I began to feel impaired. Would that sense of impairment come before or after a BAC level of 0.08 percent? Some groups, including the American Medical Association and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, want the legal limit for BAC set lower, at 0.05 percent, period.

So at 3 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, at the desk of Sgt. Todd Shaw of the Louisville Metro Police’s traffic division, I began an experiment. Before me sat a bottle of sparkling wine, a wine glass and a measuring cup.  My plan was to simulate a happy hour or party situation. I would drink one glass of wine over 15 minutes, then wait 15 minutes more to test my BAC level with a Breathalyzer, then repeat the process. (The 15-minute wait allows alcohol to leave the mouth area and gives a truer reading. A Breathalyzer estimates blood alcohol content by measuring the amount of breath alcohol content and translating it by assuming a specific ratio to alcohol in the blood.) I poured my first four-ounce glass at 3:10. Over the next 15 minutes, I sipped the wine. At 3:40, my first Breathalyzer test showed my BAC at 0.019 percent.

According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, to get to a 0.08 BAC level, a 170-pound man would have to drink the equivalent of four mixed drinks in one hour on an empty stomach; a 137-pound female, three. But several things influence how fast a person gets drunk, experts say, including the percentage of muscle versus body fat (because alcohol is more readily absorbed by water-rich muscle tissue than fat); how much food has been consumed in the last few hours (the presence of food in the stomach slows down the absorption of alcohol); the presence of drugs (sedatives or even over-the-counter cold medications can exacerbate alcohol’s effects); and general drinking habits (people who drink regularly become more efficient at metabolizing alcohol and t/files/storyimages/not to get drunk as quickly, though this reverses in chronic heavy drinkers whose livers effectively burn out). My stats: I weigh 137 pounds, have a good muscle-to-body-fat ratio, drink small to modest amounts of wine on a regular basis, had no other drugs in my system, and had eaten a medium-sized lunch two hours before.

The changes I noted at 0.019 were small. I felt relaxed and a little more talkative. The second glass went down between 3:45 and 4:00. In slightly less than an hour, I’d had two glasses of wine — a pretty conservative rate. At about 4:15, we did a second Breathalyzer test. My BAC was 0.022 percent, a surprisingly small increase, possibly related to the lunch sitting in my stomach, my somewhat muscular frame or the fact that I do drink. The changes I felt were noticeable, though. I was definitely talking and now laughing more. I can’t say that I wasn’t at least a little bit impaired.

Between 4:20 and 4:40 I downed my third glass of wine, and just before 5:00 we did my third Breathalyzer. My BAC had jumped up to 0.055 percent, a level where I could be arrested for driving drunk if there was other evidence that I was impaired — a failed sobriety test or erratic driving. I was definitely feeling tipsy. Enunciation took more effort. I found my mind wandering. Could I have driven without incident at this point? Maybe. If nothing untoward happened — if other drivers did nothing unpredictable and I encountered no unusual challenges— perhaps I could make it home all right. Was I impaired? There was little doubt in my mind that I was.  And that answered the question more important than “could I drive home?” Should I? To me, the answer was no.   

I’d planned on drinking up to 0.08 percent BAC, but didn’t think I could deal with more alcohol. It was time to head home, my husband at the wheel.  -CL