Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Drunk-Driving Killers

A six-year prison term for a woman with multiple previous citations for alcohol abuse and drunk driving, once again driving while heavily under the influence of alcohol, her vehicle littered with emptied beer cans, other alcoholic beverages close at hand, swerving crazily in night-time traffic, then piling directly into a 16-year-old boy riding his bicycle home from his evening grocery job.

The collision was horrendously forceful, throwing the boy 39 metres from the point of impact.

So drunk she did not bother to stop, despite the force of the collision bashing the boy off his mangled bicycle onto the road, and leaving him there to die. His body discovered three hours later by police. Samira Daoud's blood-alcohol level was 3 times the legal limit when she left the bar where she drank wine and tequila, before destroying Alex Hayes's life.

She refused an offer to be driven home. When the police had received numerous 911 alerts about a dangerously erratic driver and stopped her, it was a half-hour later that the boy's body was found, and fully three hours after she had plowed into the boy on his bicycle. She denied being responsible for having hit anyone.

Ontario Court Justice Celynne Dorval, finding Daoud morally culpable, also made mention of her unhappy childhood, as a kind of explanatory exoneration. Her sad and sordid childhood, having traumatized her, left her less than fully responsible, one might take it, for her lack of restraint and maturity in posing as a direct danger to others on the road.

The judge stated that Daoud, in her opinion, could not count among the worst of offenders. This, despite previous drunk-driving convictions, including 13 breaches of court-ordered conditions relating to alcohol abuse. The woman once abandoned her 2-year-old to the child's own devices as she went out with friends to drink at a bar. Clearly indifferent to her responsibilities.

Her abuse as a child in Ethiopia and forced marriage at the age of 12 to an older man, purportedly set her up for a life-time of alcohol abuse and danger to the public. Obviously, not everyone who has suffered abuse has descended into such a moral abyss. Six years in prison for taking a life. That will not necessarily translate as six years served.

And then this woman whose past exposure to alcohol-addiction programs still saw her reverting to her usual state of inebriation and lack of responsibility, will be free to resume presenting as a deadly menace on the road.

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