My Son Said He Was Fine. Five Minutes Later, A Mother And Her 4 Year Old Daughter Were Dead Because Of Him.

My son killed a mother and her four year old daughter on a crosswalk three years ago.

He is serving 14 years.

I am serving the rest of my life knowing I could have stopped it for $85.

I am writing this because my younger son turns 21 next month.

My older son's name is Daniel.

He was 24 the night it happened.

Honors graduate from a university we still drove past on holidays.

Junior associate at a regional accounting firm.

Engaged to a girl named Megan he had dated since their sophomore year.

The kind of son you brag about at family dinners.

I bragged about him a lot.

He worked Monday through Friday.

He went out Friday and Saturday nights.

He drove home from those nights a hundred times before that one.

He always said he was fine.

He always made it home.

He never had a DUI.

He never had an accident.

He never even got pulled over.

He was a good kid.

That is the part nobody understands.

When people hear what happened, they picture someone reckless.

Someone stumbling out of a bar.

Someone who did not care.

That was not my son.

My son was the kid who called his mother on Sundays.

The kid who still sent me tax questions even though he worked at an accounting firm.

The kid who drove his younger brother to basketball practice when I was stuck at work.

The kid I trusted.

And that trust is the part I keep replaying.

Because I trusted him to know when he was okay.

I never asked him how he knew.

The night it happened was a Saturday in October.

Daniel went out with three friends from work.

They started at a brewery on the east side of town around 7.

Moved to a bar near the courthouse around 9:30.

Ended up at a place with live music until just before 11.

Nothing about that night sounded unusual.

That is what makes it hard to live with.

He had drinks across four hours.

He told me later he thought it was less than it was.

He told the police he felt fine.

He passed his own test.

He stood up.

He walked.

He talked.

He ordered a water with his last beer because he wanted to be smart about it.

He got in his car at 11:04 PM.

At 11:09 PM, another family's life ended.

The crosswalk on Maple and Eighth is the kind of crosswalk every town has.

Painted lines.

Two flashing yellow lights on a metal pole.

The kind of thing you drive through at 35 every day without thinking.

There was a family on it at 11:09.

Mother.

Father.

Two kids.

The four year old was in a stroller.

The seven year old was holding her father's hand.

They had just finished dessert at a restaurant a block away.

They were walking back to their car.

The mother's name was Rachel.

She was 31.

The four year old's name was Emma.

My son says he never saw them.

That is what he said at the trial.

That is what he said to me on the phone the night it happened.

That is what he said to the judge when she asked him if he had anything to say before sentencing.

He never saw them.

The crosswalk lights were flashing.

The family was in the middle of the intersection.

He came through at 47 in a 35 zone and they were on his hood before his foot got to the brake.

Rachel died at the scene.

Emma died at the hospital at 2:14 AM.

The seven year old, Madison, watched it happen while holding her father's hand.

I want you to understand what that means.

My son did not wake up that morning as a killer.

He did not leave the bar thinking he was going to destroy a family.

He did not feel drunk.

He felt fine.

That was the problem.

The police arrived at 11:14.

Daniel was sitting on the curb when they got there.

He told them everything.

He did not argue.

He did not run.

He did not lawyer up.

He told them how many drinks he had.

He told them where he had been.

He told them he was sorry, over and over, until the officer told him to stop talking and started reading him his rights.

His blood alcohol came back at 0.11.

The legal limit in our state is 0.08.

The number was on the police report.

The number was read out at the trial.

The number was the first thing the prosecutor said in his opening statement.

Point one one.

A number my son had never heard before that night.

A number he will hear every day for the rest of his life.

The number did not care that Daniel was a good kid.

It did not care that he had a job.

It did not care that he was engaged.

It did not care that he drank water.

It did not care that he thought he felt fine.

The number was over.

That was enough.

I drove to the police station at 1 AM.

My wife was with me.

Daniel's fiancée was with me.

Daniel's younger brother was with me.

We waited in a hallway with plastic chairs and a vending machine.

The officer who came out to talk to us looked like he was 30.

He had kids of his own.

You could tell.

He said the words I had been telling myself in the car could not be true.

A woman was dead.

A four year old girl was at the hospital and was not going to make it.

My son was being charged with two counts of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated.

My wife went down on her knees in that hallway.

The officer caught her before her head hit the floor.

The Family I Knew

The trial was eight months later.

The prosecutor called Marcus to the stand.

Marcus was Rachel's husband.

Emma's father.

Madison's father.

He was wearing a gray suit.

Madison was in the second row with her grandparents.

She was eight years old by then.

Marcus was asked to identify a photograph of his wife.

He said her name.

Rachel Anne Whitfield.

He was asked to identify a photograph of his daughter.

He said her name.

Emma Grace Whitfield.

She would have been five in March.

Then the prosecutor asked him to read a statement he had written.

He read it for nine minutes.

I cannot tell you what was in that statement.

I have tried.

My therapist has asked me.

I have not been able to repeat any of it out loud in three years.

I can tell you that when he finished, the courtroom did not move for a long time.

The judge did not call the next witness.

The prosecutor did not stand up.

The defense attorney sat with his hand on my son's shoulder.

My son cried with his face in his hands.

And I can tell you the only thing I have ever wished I could give Marcus.

The one thing I have wished I could put in his hands and say, take this.

Is the $85 device that would have made his wife and his daughter still be alive.

Daniel got 14 years.

He is at a state correctional facility two and a half hours from our house.

We visit every other Sunday.

He is 27 now.

He will be 41 when he gets out.

He has thought about killing himself.

He told me that the first year.

He told me he had worked out how to do it and the only thing that stopped him was that his death would not bring Rachel and Emma back.

He works in the prison library.

He is studying to become a substance abuse counselor for when he gets out.

He says the only useful thing he can do with the rest of his life is try to keep one other person from doing what he did.

His fiancée did not stay.

She visited him for the first six months.

Then she stopped.

I do not blame her.

The Support Group

About a year after the trial, I went to a support group.

It was a group for parents of DUI offenders.

There were eleven of us.

A church basement off the highway.

Coffee that nobody drank.

A woman named Patricia ran it.

Her son had killed a 19 year old college student in 2009.

He was out of prison by then.

He was working at a hardware store.

He was sober.

She asked us to go around the room and say what we wished we had given our kids before it happened.

When it got to me, I could not speak.

A man across from me, his name was Frank, took it.

He pulled something out of his pocket.

He set it on the table.

It was a small black device.

About the size of a TV remote.

It had a screen on the front.

There was a small mouthpiece you blew into.

Frank said:

"This is what I wish I had given my son."

His son had killed a man on a motorcycle in 2014.

His son was at 0.09.

Frank told us he had thought about buying his son one for his 21st birthday and decided it would feel insulting.

He said he had the same conversation with himself that I had with mine.

He said the man on the motorcycle had two kids.

He said the device on the table cost $85.

I asked Frank what it was called.

He told me.

SoberSense Pro Breathalyzer.

Why the Sensor Matters

I want to tell you something about that device that took me a long time to understand.

It does not stop anyone from drinking.

That is what I thought it would do when I first picked one up.

I thought if I gave my son one, I would be telling him not to drink.

I thought he would resent me.

I thought he would not use it.

I thought the whole thing would be a gesture I made to make myself feel like a good father.

That is not what it does.

What it does is tell you a number.

That is it.

You blow into it.

The screen shows your BAC.

If the number is zero, you know.

If the number is anything else, you have a decision to make.

You can sit in your car for an hour.

You can call a cab.

You can call your father.

You can sleep on the couch.

You can do whatever you want.

But you have a number in front of you.

And you cannot pretend you do not know what it is.

The number does not let you lie to yourself.

That is the only thing my son needed that night and did not have.

Frank told me something else at the second meeting.

He said do not buy the cheap $20 or $30 ones.

He said those use a different sensor that can lose accuracy over time and give false confidence at exactly the moment you cannot afford it.

He said a cheap number can be worse than no number if you trust it.

That sentence stayed with me.

Because this is not a party trick.

This is not something you pass around for laughs.

This is the number that decides whether someone drives.

The SoberSense Pro uses fuel cell sensor technology.

That is the kind of sensor people look for when the number actually matters.

The cheap drugstore breathalyzers can give you confidence without giving you certainty.

And confidence is what got my son in the car.

A cheap number is worse than no number if your family trusts it.

That margin is the difference between Daniel and a father who drove home safely.

You cannot stake another family's life on a $20 drugstore device.

The Hardware Store

I bought three SoberSense Pro Breathalyzers the night I got home from that meeting.

One for my younger son's car.

He turned 19 that year.

He is 22 now.

He still has it.

He uses it every Friday and Saturday night before he drives home from anywhere.

One for my own car.

I am 54.

I drink wine with my wife at dinner three or four nights a week.

I check it before I drive anywhere after dinner.

Most nights it reads zero.

Some nights it does not.

The nights it does not, I sit at my kitchen table for an hour and read.

And one for the drawer in my hallway.

That one is for Daniel.

I will give him that one on the day he comes home.

I will give it to him before I give him anything else.

I will tell him I should have given it to him fourteen years earlier.

About six months ago, I was at a hardware store buying a part for my lawnmower.

I came around an aisle and there was a man at the end of it with a daughter about ten years old.

He was holding her hand.

She had a stuffed animal under her other arm.

I knew him before he turned around.

It was Marcus.

He saw me.

I saw him.

His daughter looked up at him and asked him a question I could not hear.

He answered quietly.

He did not take his eyes off me.

I walked toward him.

I do not know why I did.

I had told myself for three years that if I ever saw him, I would turn around.

But that day my legs walked me to him.

I stopped a few feet away.

I said his name.

He did not say anything.

I said: I am Daniel's father.

He said: I know.

I said: I am sorry.

He said: I know.

Then he took his daughter's hand and walked past me.

They went to the parking lot.

I watched him buckle her into the car.

I watched him sit in the driver's seat for a long time before he started the engine.

I stood in that aisle for a long time after they left.

I have not been the same man since that day.

I think about Madison.

The seven year old who watched it happen.

She is eleven now.

She is getting close to the age where she will be a passenger in her friends' cars.

She will be in cars driven by boys who say they are fine.

She lost her mother and her sister in front of her on a crosswalk because a 24 year old said he was fine.

I cannot give Marcus his wife back.

I cannot give him his daughter back.

I cannot give Madison her mother back.

The only thing I can do, the only single thing I can do as long as I am alive, is talk to other fathers.

About the $85 device.

About the conversation I never had with my son.

About what I wish I had said when he came home from college and told me he had driven home from a party because he was fine.

I should have said: How do you know?

I should have said: Let me show you something.

I should have put a number in his hand.

If you are reading this and you have a son or a daughter or a grandson or a granddaughter who drives home from anywhere, anywhere at all, and they have ever said the words "I'm fine," I am asking you to do one thing.

Buy one of these.

Put it in their car.

Tell them you love them.

Tell them you trust them.

Tell them you know they are a good kid.

Tell them this is not about whether you trust them.

It is about whether you trust the part of their brain that decides whether they are fine, because that part of the brain is the first part alcohol changes.

Tell them whatever you have to tell them.

But get one in their hand before the next Saturday night.

I keep one in my own glove box now.

So does my younger son.

So will my older son the day he comes home.

I bought the same model Frank showed me in that church basement.

The SoberSense Pro Breathalyzer.

The one with the fuel cell sensor.

The one that gives you a real number instead of a guess.

It costs less than what I used to spend on a bottle of wine for my son's birthday.

It cost less than the first lawyer call after the arrest.

It cost less than the tow.

It cost less than the funeral flowers.

It cost less than the headstone.

There are two headstones.

I have driven past that cemetery fourteen times in three years.

I have not gone in.

I will go in someday.

I do not know when.

The SoberSense Pro Breathalyzer costs $84.99.

It fits in a glove compartment.

It gives a real BAC number in seconds.

That is all it does.

That is all my son needed.

Please.

Please.

Do not be me.

Here is where I got mine for whoever is interested:

https://trysobersense.com/products/sobersense-pro-breathalyzer