Joining a none-too-liked list

Sandra Hofstadler's name became infamous this week and synonomys with a lot of what is wrong with our judicial system. She joins the ranks of Alfredo Ramos who killed two teenage girls minding their own business, sitting at a traffic light in Virginia Beach several years ago and threw the issue of illegal immigrants breaking our laws into the national spotlight. Now we're going to start insisting that DUI's be treated more severely.

I watched the video of her just before she was arrested by the police and besides "freakin'" she was also doing something called "tweakin'" (Watch her hands) that I use to see a lot as a trucker-the truckstop prostitutes would do this a LOT from whatever drugs had ravaged their system and brain. It's a sad sight to see because even in spite of what she is alleged to have done, there are people (like her Mother) who care about her and she has harmed people who were simply sending their kids off to another day at school.

In the forums, I can't help but notice there is a LOT of outrage and calls for the maximum penalty of law applied to this woman (Hofstadler) from what I assume (by their screen names) women and I suppose that is only natural since children are involved in this sad, tragic crash.

Notice, I didn't call it an "accident," I called it a "crash" because an accident is when a coffee cup slips from your grasp and shatters, a crash is what happens when an intoxicated person slips behind the wheel and shatters the lives of others. Big difference there.

I saw the mug shot of Hofstadler after she was arrested and she's looking pretty rough in that photo. Compare that with the not-too-bad looking middle aged woman sitting at the bar in this WAVY-10 interview done just a few weeks ago. It's easy to see the dark circles under her eyes and it looks as though she's been awake ever since that interview.

Something went terribly wrong between new years eve and Thursday morning, I don't know what, I can't speculate but all I can say is that people (and the courts) can be pretty forgiving of mistakes as long as your mistakes don't hurt others. When your mistakes or lapses in judgement hurt someone else, especially a child, or in this case, three children doing nothing more than being in their yard and trying to go to school, sympathy dries up pretty fast and mercy for your misdeeds isn't something (most) people are interested in hearing about-they want you to be punished severely.

The saddest part of drug or alcohol additction is this:It's like the person addicted has a rope tied to their waist and that rope is also tied to the waist of anyone who cares about them. If the addict decides to jump off that cliff, the people who love them are taken down, too. The problem is when that rope also snares people who don't even know the addict like these four people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time were trying to start a school day when Ms. Hofstadler came along and changed their plans for the next few months, years or perhaps forever.

I'm not going to belabor the "Don't drive under the influence" message again. People have heard the message, understood it and in some cases still ignore it. But this is what happens when people drive under the influence. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooner or later, fate just has a way of catching up with you.

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