The dad was drunk, speeding, weaving in and out of traffic in his old beater of a pickup truck, going north on Alma Road between 15th Street and Park Blvd. He passed a car, cut to the right, then swerved off the road to avoid rear ending another car. As he bounced over the curb, his pickup rolled. His three-year-old daughter standing next to him on the bench seat of old truck was hurled out the window. The truck rolled over her, crushing her before it came to rest. The drunk was still behind the wheel with barely a scratch on him.
I was the sergeant on duty at @PlanoPolice Department that afternoon. I went to the scene where our special traffic unit responded to the fatality. Then I went to the hospital where the ambulance had taken the dead baby and her drunk father.
As I entered the ER, I saw the little girl’s body on a gurney with IV’s and tubes and wires, but the instruments had been turned off. The nurses and doctors were standing around, silent and morose. The drunk father was sitting in a chair staring at the floor between his feet, almost catatonic as his intoxicated mind was trying to make sense of what was happening.
I had been there barely a minute taking in that scene when the little girl’s mother burst into the room and fell onto her knees next to the gurney and began petting the baby’s head and straightening her clothes as she talked to the little girl. Then she looked up, suddenly aware of the circle of people around her, saying, “She’s just taking a little nap. She’ll be okay. She’s just sleeping. She’ll be fine.”
Her drunk husband just sat there staring at the floor, not even looking at his wife. I decided I needed to get him out of there quickly before she came to the realization that her drunk husband had just killed their baby daughter. I took his arm and advised him he was under arrest for DUI and vehicular homicide as I was raising him to a standing position. I started to recite the Miranda warning.
Suddenly, the mother’s full wrath and fury focused on me like a laser. In her mind, I was the cause of everything that was happening. She charged me in a rage with her open hands poised to scratch my eyes out. In that instant, I determined to stand still and let her vent her fury on me, knowing that the doctor and nurses were already moving to restrain her. I would not fight back or strike this poor woman whose baby girl had just been killed by her drunk husband.
But the enraged woman stopped just short of me, wailing unintelligibly. She never laid a finger on me. The doctor and nurses altered their response and gently guided her to a nearby chair while I quickly cuffed her husband and hurried him from the room before realization of what had happened set in and she turned on her husband.
The combination of drunk driving and an unrestrained baby is tragedy looking for a place to happen. I will never lose the heartbreaking movie that plays in my mind from time to time of that mother kneeling next to her dead baby, “She’s just taking a little nap. She’ll be okay.”