A drunk driving crash.
When a drunk driver killed a Houston boy over the weekend it was yet another in a seemingly series of instances in an intoxicated motorist slams into another vehicle, bicycle, even a day care center, crashes that add up to the deaths of hundreds of youths each year.
But a separate Texas crash late last March was far more indicative of the dangers of drunk driving. Police in the town of Irving arrested 30-year-old Crystal Suniga and charged her with drunk driving and manslaughter after she lost control of her vehicle and slammed into two parked cars killing two of her four children inside.
“Despite what’s commonly thought, it’s not a family in one car and a drunk driver in another,” said Dr. Kyran Quinlan, of Northwestern University, the lead author of a new study that indicates fully two-thirds of those under the age of 15 who are killed in crashes involving a drunk driver were actually in the car being driven by the intoxicated motorist.
And while the overall number of deaths involving intoxicated motorists has declined in recent years, the research by Northwestern University shows that basic statistic has remained the same for the past three decades.
According to the study, conducted by Northwestern’s, Dr. Quinlan, along with researchers from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many of the deaths were preventable, as nearly two out of three of the children who were killed were not wearing seatbelts at the time of the accident.
Ironically, “About 70 percent of the time the drunk driver survived the crash,” Quinlan told the Reuter’s news service. “This means many times the crashes were survivable and if the child were buckled up they might have lived.”
(Feds want ignition interlock for drunk drivers. Click Here for the story.)
Car crashes are one of the leading causes of death for children and among those under 15, 1,210 died in 2010 alone, according to government tracking data – one out of every five due to a crash involving drunk driving. Using the federal government’s FARS, or Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the researchers found such 2,344 fatalities between 2001 and 2010, 65% riding in the vehicle operated by the drunk driver.
The study also found that the majority of the drunken drivers were adults, many of whom were operating their vehicle without a valid license.
(GM faces yet more safety-related recalls, NHTSA reports. Click Here for the latest.)
The one positive finding was that there has been a sharp decline in such fatalities, which fell from 6,000 child deaths in a study on drunken driving covering the years 1985 to 1996. But that study also found two of every three of the fatalities involved children riding with the intoxicated motorist.
Texas and California had the highest instance of such fatal crashes – though the rates were actually higher in smaller states when adjusted to reflect their lower populations.
Published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the study found that children were most vulnerable in South Dakota, where one child died while riding with a drunk driver for every 100,000 children in the state. The lowest incident was in New Jersey where about 0.07 children died per every 100,000.
Researchers said there appeared to be a direct connection to the strength of a state’s enforcement of drunk driving laws.
(Despite crackdown on drunk driving, six states still allow motorists to drink behind the wheel. Click Here to check out some of the weirdest driving laws.)