Tragic Dallas, Texas Accident Takes Lives, Exposes Holes in Legal System
Early Monday morning a drunk driver killed a newlywed couple and injured four others in a horrific car accident near Interstate 75 and Mockingbird Lane in Dallas, Texas. Prior to the accident, police pulled a man driving with a female passenger over whose vehicle had been weaving in and out of traffic. When the officer started to approach him, the driver sped away with his lights off, eventually running a red light and slamming into a carload of Southern Methodist University (SMU) students. All five of them suffered injuries. The impact from that crash sent the drunk driver’s Tahoe flying into another car—killing a newlywed couple. At the hospital, his passenger was in serious condition while he was upgraded to fair.
If this story isn’t tragic enough, it gets worse. The drunk driver had previously been convicted of DWI twice before and two other DWI charges were pending. He was out on bond, which had been revoked and had four outstanding warrants. He was driving the night of the crash with a suspended license and two empty bottles of Patron tequila.
This is one of those tragic cases of someone slipping through the cracks of the legal system. Why wasn’t he in jail? Who forgot to take his license…and his car for that matter? Apparently on one of his latest DWI charges, the “system” did not catch his prior DWI’s.
I only practice personal injury law—not criminal law, but it just seems to me like the law should mandate that the driver should have already been in jail. This man should have already lost his freedom.
