If you’ve ever spotted what you suspect is a drunk driver and you are wondering whether or not to call that person in, you’ve probably also speculated as to what could happen if you don’t. When people are weighing the pros and cons of “bothering” law enforcement over someone who might not even be drunk, they often wonder just how much damage that suspected drunk driver could do if they don’t call.
If a few recent DUI cases are any indicator, the short answer is quite a bit. In what seems like minutes a suspected drunk driver can crash several times, and you can take the case of a woman in Greenville, North Carolina as an example: she caused two crashes within hours, and the damage adds up to thousands of dollars.
Her first crash happened when she rear ended the vehicle in front of her. Instead of stopping to see if the person she hit was injured, she kept driving. The damage to that vehicle was approximately $500.
What does a drunk driver do when they aren’t stopped for one crash and can keep on driving? Crash again, of course. This time she crashed head on into a car, and she managed to leave the scene there too. Thankfully no one was injured, but the damage to the truck she hit is approximately $20,000 and the damage to her own vehicle is approximately $5,000.
When she was finally arrested police found she was three times the legal limit of .08, and she received multiple charges for her the crashes and for driving under the influence in North Carolina.
That’s $25,000 in damages, all in the space of a few hours, and that’s why every state should have an all offender ignition interlock law. With an interlock on her vehicle she wouldn’t have been able to start the car if she was under the influence, and keeping that car in the driveway would have saved a few drivers a lot of stress, and money, that day.
The Friday Fallout: Every Friday Guardian Interlock will bring you a unique drunk driving case that demonstrates the impact, or fallout, of drunk driving.