Serious Sentence for a Drunk Driver
By Jeffrey Page
There’s the kind of death where they put you in the ground. Another kind is where you survive unspeakable injuries that never heal.
Similarly there are judges who treat drunken drivers, and the misery they inflict, almost as a joke when they pass sentence, and those who understand that a drunk behind the wheel places everyone in danger and sentence accordingly.
Which brings us to Willie A. Thompson. In 1989, the third time Thompson drove drunk – at least the third time anyone knows about – he killed a cop with his car. He spent 11 years in prison for that. Last winter, in his eighth drunken driving arrest, Thompson slammed into trees and a fire hydrant, and for that, he’s been sent to prison for 15 years to life after telling the judge about his own troubles. “I’m very sick,” he was quoted by The Times Herald-Record. “I’m very sorry that things have happened the way they did.”
Thompson is 72 and indeed a sick man. It’s possible he’ll die in prison. He got his 15-to-life when he appeared before Orange County Court Judge Robert Freehill who concluded that the public needs protection from the likes of Thompson. Freehill deserves plaudits for sending him away.
Before anybody chirps, “But Thompson didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” allow me to introduce Barbara Rokas, whose dreadful injuries and terrible suffering demonstrate how drunken driving sometimes is not taken seriously.
In June 1990, Barbara Rokas was a first-grade teacher in Kearny, N.J. She estimated that in her 28-year career, she had taught 1,000 children how to read and do arithmetic. She loved her job and was good at it. She was on her way to confer with a colleague when she drove into the intersection of Stuyvesant Avenue and Chestnut Street. She stopped for the stop sign, then proceeded.
A teenager – 19 years old; too young to drink in New Jersey – came flying down Chestnut Street. He didn’t bother with such niceties as stop signs or brake pedals and smashed into Rokas’s car. His blood alcohol concentration was 0.19, almost twice the legal limit in 1990.
There was so much of Barbara Rokas’s blood on the pavement that an ambulance driver covered her face with a sheet. Then someone noticed that her hand moved. She was alive. And this is a catalogue of what that drunken driver did to her.
Because of him she needed 500 stitches to close her head wounds and many more to close other parts of her cut-up body.
He caused her to have brain damage.
He put her in a coma for 22 days.
He fractured her thighbone and broke her collarbone.
He paralyzed her entire right side due to nerve damage he inflicted through the fracture of her collarbone.
He left her deaf in one ear.
He left her with double vision.
He left her with severe memory loss.
He left her unable to get around without a wheelchair.
He left her with slurred speech.
Her injuries were such that when her husband went to see her for the first time in her hospital bed in Newark, her doctor issued a warning. This is what Bob Rokas said when I wrote about Barbara for The Record of Hackensack: “[The doctor] told me: ‘When you go in there, she’s going to look like she’s dead, but she’s not dead.’ He had his hands on my arms, sort of holding me up against the wall to make sure I understood what he was saying. I opened the door and went in. She was bald and her head was bandaged. I never saw anyone that color before. She was sort of yellow or orange. My wife.”
In fact, when her lawyers brought an action against the taverns that had served the 19-year old, they filled five pages with her injuries. This is what her lawyers wrote, “[She] has also suffered, and will continue to suffer, loss of the pleasures and pursuits of life and a diminution and impairment of her capacity to enjoy life.” Next time someone says, “But he didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” think of Barbara Rokas who remains one of the more courageous people you’re likely to meet.
She would need aides to help her live her life. It would take her two hours to get dressed in the morning and two hours to get undressed to go to bed. She required help to take a bath, comb her hair, brush her teeth, eat a meal.
Much, much later, if she and her husband wished to have dinner in a restaurant, people would stare at her and the very slow way she ate her meal. They would watch as one of her arms involuntarily slid along the table and pushed her plate away.
“I have aides around the clock, seven days a week,” she told me in 2001. “My life is basically a zero.”
When the man who reduced her life to a zero appeared for sentencing, the judge likely knew that he didn’t mean to hurt her.
And so, for what he did to Barbara Rokas, the man would have to serve two months of weekend home confinement, the judge said.
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com
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