Drunk-driving victims tell their story to offenders
Mille Lacs County requires DWI offenders to listen to Victim Impact Panel set up by MADD chapter
By Joel Stottrup
The setting is a room in a church in Milaca, where a group of 33 to 46 people who have been convicted of drunken driving hear a message. In front of the group is a panel of two or three people who describe what it is like to have a family member killed or seriously injured in a drunken-driving collision. The atmosphere at these meetings, which have been occurring every three months in Mille Lacs County since last April, is very quiet, in the words of Mille Lacs County probation department director Warren Liepitz. The sessions make up the VIP (victim impact panel) program to help DWI offenders better understand the consequences of driving while impaired. The Mille Lacs chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) established the program in Mille Lacs a little more than a year ago. With few exceptions, said Liepitz last week, all DWI offenders who live in and have been convicted of a DWI offense in Mille Lacs since the program began, have been ordered to attend a panel session in Mille Lacs as part of their court sentence. Liepitz, or one of the other four Mille Lacs County probation officers, attends each of the panel sessions, to help make sure the people who are ordered there show up and that everyone in the audience conducts themselves properly. When the first victim-impact panel session took place in April 2002, 42 DWI offenders were referred by the court to attend. There were 34 and 46 offender referrals respectively in the next two sessions. The last session last month had 33. As of last week, 15 offenders are on the list to attend the next session in April. Eighty to 85 percent of the referrals are from Mille Lacs County, with most of the remaining offenders coming from Kanabec County because Kanabec doesn't have the program. Counties have DWI offenders go to a victim-impact panel either where they reside or at the closest location, Liepitz noted. Because some of the people who committed the DWI offense in Mille Lacs are from another county, the numbers attending the Mille Lacs VIP sessions under-represents the number of DWI offenses in the county, said Liepitz. Liepitz adds that Mille Lacs probation officers have 350 to 375 active cases for all crimes involving adults and that another 400 cases are monitored by case aids. Considering that most of these cases are DWI, the numbers give an idea of the magnitude of DWI offenses in Mille Lacs, he said. Liepitz doesn't have figures about the county's per- capita ranking for DWI offenses but said he understands it is high. His most up-to-date copy of the Minnesota Crime Information manual is for 1997 and shows the number of DWI offenses in Mille Lacs that year at 295. That data comes from Princeton Police and the Mille Lacs County Sheriff's Department and doesn't include what the Highway Patrol has logged. Minnesota law states that anyone driving with a blood alcohol content of .10 percent or more is guilty of DWI. A bill is in the Legislature again to make the threshold for DWI conviction to be .08 percent. Eventually, if the state doesn't change its DWI minimum to .08, it will lose a large amount of federal funding for transportation, according to Liepitz. History of the VIP
program The VIP program began about 15 years ago in Oregon when a mother whose daughter was killed by an intoxicated driver watched as the offender served six months and then was set free. Dick Sarafolean, a volunteer at the Minnesota MADD office, said the mother who lost her daughter had a life sentence in the sense that the mother never had her daughter again. The mother, feeling there was an injustice in how offenders could continue with their life and perhaps not understanding how much pain they had caused, asked the judge to consider setting up a VIP program to show DWI offenders the victims' perspective. Liepitz did not have records last week to show if the VIP program has influenced any DWI offenders not to repeat such offenses. But he did say this: "I think the people who show up at these sessions definitely hear some information and perspective they've never heard before, and it is directly impactful on the consequences of drinking and driving." Liepitz also talked about one VIP session he observed, saying the panel consisted of two people who had lost family members to intoxicated drivers. "They talked about the family members they had lost, talked about where the family members were killed and presented it very graphically, very specifically," Liepitz said. "They detailed what the event was about and the longstanding impact on them as a family member who has lost somebody." Liepitz notes that Mille Lacs County for a number of years had sent its DWI offenders to other locales that have the VIP program, including St. Cloud, Pine City, Brainerd and the metro area. VIP sessions are just one piece in the process that goes on once someone is convicted of DWI. For example, once convicted, the offender is assessed for their alcohol problem. From there the person may go to their insurance company to fund their chemical abuse counseling, and the offenders end up in a treatment program. Some go to county social services for funding for treatment, while those who are military veterans could end up being treated at a VA hospital, said Liepitz. Even those DWI offenders who do not have a chemical dependency problem must at a minimum go to some kind of educational session, he said. If they do have a dependency problem, they go into a recovery program such as the one run in Princeton in concert with St. Cloud Hospital, Liepitz said. Liepitz noted that the two judges who preside in Mille Lacs County, Steve Ruble and Michael Jesse, are very supportive of the VIP program. Some of the impacts Minnesota MADD volunteer Sarafolean spoke emotionally during a telephone call Friday about his experience as a victim of someone's drunken driving. He said his sister was 4 years old when she was seriously injured in a drunken-driving incident. "It took her seven years to die," he said. Technically, she died during a surgery but the surgery was the fifth she had to have as a result of the drunken-driving incident, he said. The details of the incident seem to be etched into Sarafolean's mind. He told about the date and time of day of the collision and the time of day when she died. Both were the day before Thanksgiving. He said it took years for his mother to even smile during Thanksgiving because of memories of the tragedy, and he said his father grieved in a destructive way. His father, he said, was so full of anger and pain over what happened to his daughter, that he drank too much and eventually had a rupture in his body from the endless drinking and died "drowning in his own blood," Sarafolean said. He also told of a 19-year-old girl, injured in a drunken-driving collision, having to have her jaw reshaped three times because the damage was so severe. Her jaw hinges would wear out and it would get infected, Sarafolean said, adding that she also lost her memory. But one only needs to look in Mille Lacs County to see similar pain. Talk to Janice Wagner of Onamia, for example, who is the new coordinator of the Mille Lacs VIP program. She has worked nearly 13 years as an ambulance EMT in Onamia and said this about drunken-driving collisions: "I've seen it kill people, I've seen it maim people." Wagner also talked about the pain a woman expressed while on a panel at one of the VIP sessions. The woman told how "disturbing" it had been when she had to identify her brother after he had been killed by a drunk driver. Wagner remembers the woman saying it is something she will never forget. Wagner told of a man who was on a panel talking about the DWI collision that killed several members of his family and seriously injured another family member. The offender hadn't even realized he had hit anybody as he ran over the back of the family's vehicle and kept on going, Wagner said. Wagner said she thinks the VIP sessions are doing some good, judging by comments from offenders at the sessions. There are some "tough guys who have a little attitude when they first come in," she said about the start of the session. Some of them, for example, have complained at first about having to pay the $30 fee to attend the session, she explained. But by the time they leave, those same individuals are "totally different people," she said. "They thank you and thank the speakers. One offender who had a DWI a year ago and has been to a VIP session, hasn't had a drink since, and has said the VIP affirmed his choice not to drink and drive." Most have stated in their evaluation forms at the end of the sessions that they will not drink and drive again, Wagner said. "I kind of like doing it because I feel it will help," Wagner said of coordinating the sessions. "Will it ever end it [the drinking and driving]? I doubt it. People will always do it, people who don't think. But it does some serious good."
Princeton Union-Eagle
P.O. Box 278
Princeton, MN 55371
Telephone: 763-389-1222
Fax: 763-389-1728
E-Mail: pueproduction@ecm-inc.com
|
