I am reprinting this article from today's Cincinnati Enquirer because it should be read. Nothing I could add would matter.
Woman dies in I-71 crash
Firefighter accused of driving drunk after party
BY WILLIAM A. WEATHERS | BWEATHERS@ENQUIRER.COM
A 26-year-old Delhi Township woman died early Thursday on Interstate 71 when an off-duty Cincinnati firefighter who had been drinking and was driving the wrong way on the highway hit her car, police say.
"This shouldn't have happened," Donna Walters said Thursday of the death of her daughter, Lisa Kreutzer, who leaves behind a 7-year-old daughter, Sydney.
Kreutzer attended the Cincinnati-Xavier basketball game Wednesday and afterward went to Covington's MainStrasse to socialize with friends, said Walters, who shared a home with her daughter.
Kreutzer, a customer representative for Humana in Covington, was giving a co-worker a ride back to his car, which was parked on Eden Park Drive in Walnut Hills, when the crash occurred, her mother said.
Police charged Cincinnati firefighter Joseph Dance with two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide in Kreutzer's death. Dance, 28, of Green Township, is in the Hamilton County Justice Center and is scheduled for arraignment this morning.
Alcohol is believed to be a factor in the crash, police said. Dance attended a Christmas party thrown by firefighters Wednesday night at the Game Day Sports Café on Pete Rose Way.
Dance faces two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide because he caused a death while driving drunk and because he recklessly caused a death, police said. Both charges carry a possible sentence of up to eight years in prison.
The firefighter was driving a 2000 Ford Expedition south in the northbound lanes when he collided with Kreutzer's 1993 Chevrolet Corsica near the Reading Road/Eden Park Drive exit about 1:25 a.m., police said. Kreutzer was taken to University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead shortly after her arrival.
Dance entered the interstate in the wrong direction at Reading Road, police said.
According to police records, he was operating his SUV while impaired from the "ingestion of an alcohol beverage." Dance admitted to drinking before the crash and had "a strong odor of an intoxicating liquor about his person," police said. They also said he had watery eyes and performed poorly on field sobriety tests.
Dance refused any chemical tests of his blood-alcohol-level, police said.
Both Dance and Kreutzer wore seat belts at the time of the crash, police said.
City spokeswoman Meg Olberding said Thursday that Dance was placed on unpaid leave pending the outcome of police and city administrative investigations. He could lose his $56,800-a-year job, depending on the outcome of those investigations, she said.
Olberding said she didn't know whether Dance attended the Game Day party, but said it was not a city-sanctioned event.
Dance has been a Cincinnati firefighter since 2000 and was assigned to Firehouse 17 in Lower Price Hill.
Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory issued a statement Thursday: "My heart goes out to the family of Lisa Kreutzer in this terrible time of tragedy. We all will be keeping the Kreutzer family in our thoughts and prayers. I encourage everyone to take this moment to remember the love of your friends and family during the holiday season and throughout the year."
Lou Rubenstein, Dance's attorney, declined to comment Thursday, noting that he had not had a chance to speak with his client.
Walters was surrounded by grieving family members Thursday afternoon.
"I don't even know how to put this into words - that someone spending his career saving people would take a life," she said. "If he had picked up the phone and called a cab, she would be sitting here now, and Sydney would have a mom."
Walters said it was tough telling her granddaughter that her mother wasn't coming home. "I said it was an accident. He didn't want to hurt Mommy," she said. "I told her Mommy was in heaven now."
Sydney didn't say much. Family members knew she understood when she started crying.
Walters spared Sydney the details of the crash but was at a loss for words when the girl asked, "Did it hurt?"
"She wants her mom back," Walters said. "She wanted every picture we had of her with her mom."
The family played a movie Thursday for Sydney in an attempt to help her feel better, but every few minutes, she thought of her mother.
"It's good that I wasn't in the car, right?" she said at one point.
And later, she asked: "Can I still get Mommy flowers for her birthday?"
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Comments: 42
My son is a firefighter and he has frequently attended parties soley for the purpose of getting his buddies home safely. A person's career doesn't mean they don't "party" occassionaly, but designated drivers should be included in the planning of the party!
It is also very sad for the firefighter's family, that he will now be remembered as a killer, instead of a brave man who saved others.
There are no winners in this story.
This story just numbes the nerves.
The amount of lives that will be changed forever because of this one incident is mind boggling. Lisa Kreutzer's daughter Sydney is only seven years old and already the world has crashed in on her. As you say, the firefighter's whole family is devastated, and everyone who knows anyone involved in the crash has had their life turned upside down. On top of that, it will cast yet another cloud over the city of Cincinnati, because the driver who caused the crash was city employee. This is as sad a situation as you can find.
Marsha, I totally agree with you.
I had an uncle , when I was a kid, who drank himself to death. On his death bed, he told my mom not to cry for him, because he did it to himself. He's been dead over thirty years and the cloud he cast over the family still lingers.
Drunk drivers can't think. They can move their body and make it do things, but thinking is not part of the equation.
A dead mother and an orphaned child are the result of this lapse in judgement. Most likely those who like to drink and drive will insist that they never get "that drunk".
Just two days ago, the memories were still as vivid for my DIL as ever.
One drunk changed the lives of many people.
Please, people....don't drive, even after one drink.
In today's world of "it only matters as long as it's a headline" we all need to think hard about what the reality of life is versus what the media tells us it is. When a family member is ripped from this life for no good reason whatsoever the family (and therfore society ) never totally recovers.
Heidi, congratulations, I know every day is a struggle for you. My second wife's father has been a drunk for over 50 years, he's even drunk himself into having diabetes but he won't stop. How to stop this madness is a tough one. Part would be, I think, to make it much less socially acceptable to drink to excess. Removing the stigma attached to having a drug or alcohol problem would help some to seek treatment more readily. There are, unfortunately, no easy answers for this.
Why do we , as a society, find the image of the hard drinking, hard smoking, "the hell with what happens", person so attractive ? That image looks good on paper, but it almost always destroys the life around it in reality.
You know you may just be a hero George and never know it! If just one person sees this article and is touched enough to make the decision not to drive drunk this holiday season, then you could be saving lives ... Thanks!
I personally have made it a point to avoid driving drunk, ever since I had a horrific re-occuring nightmare in college, in which I drove impaired, head on into an oncoming vehicle. I was awakened each of three consecutive nights to a pair of glaring headlights directly in front of me. That's the sort of dream that can grab your attention, particularly when it happens three nights in a row.
The best work is the kind you do that works and you never even know about it.
Stay sober , let the music get you high.
Wow, tough love self-induced; I like it.
First, you have to find a way to get around the "free market capitalists" who cry foul with every attempt at any level of government regulation of any kind whatsoever. After all, it's not alcohol that kills, it's cars.
The biggest problem would be jailing the percentage of our 300,000,000 population that didn't take the law seriously.
This is very sad, and unfortunately not at all uncommon. Of course, heavy drinking (as in this story) is the most risky, but I wonder how many people realize that even a small amount of alcohol (ie well below the legal limit) dramatically impairs judgment and reaction time.
I agree with Mark M. that drunk drivers can think but choose not to do so. The decision about drinking or driving can and should be made before a person even goes out, and certainly before the person takes his/her first drink. If a person drinks, knowing he/she will have to drive, then he/she has chosen to put the lives of other people at risk. It is as simple as that.
Clark,
You wrote: "First, you have to find a way to get around the "free market capitalists" who cry foul with every attempt at any level of government regulation of any kind whatsoever."
Speaking as a free market capitalist, I would have absolutely no problem with a drunk-driving law similar to that in Sweden. I believe in capitalism, not anarchy. For proponents of capitalism, government does have a proper and important role, which is to protect individual rights from those who would (intentionally, recklessly or negligently) violate those rights. As for the drunk driver, he/she has no right to put others at risk of death or serious injury, and should be penalized for doing so.
I wonder what would happen if drunk drivers that caused a fatal accident had to live with members of the family they affected for a year ?
Thanks "Stay Alive ".
The combination of the instant media coverage and social education about things like drunk driving may eventually force us to look this demon in the eye. I guess we humans are slow to admit weaknesses, so instead we try to make those weaknesses look like a "cool thing".
I grew up, like most people, in a world where most adults drove drunk and thought nothing of it, but there where far less other cars ( and drunk drivers ) on the roads in those days. Nowdays, it's hard not to crash into someone when driving sober. It 's well past time to admit that there are just too many people and other vehicles on the road to shrug off drunk driving as a "cool thing, as long as nobody dies ".
Boston is not alone. Around here, on any given day of the week drunks in motion on the highways are obvious.
If the drunk driver had to live with the family of the person he/she killed, I imagine it would really bring home the devastation he/she caused. Still, it would be really hard on the family, having to live with the person who killed their loved one.
I think the key to reducing the number of drunk drivers is twofold: education and increased penalties for driving drunk. The penalties for drunk driving should be made severe enough to deter those who still think it's "cool" to drink and drive.
I'm all for increased penalties for drunk drivers, but that solution also calls for addressing one of our country's biggest and least talked about problems. There are currently over 2 million prisoners in our nation's prison systems. Cities and counties all aross the nation are running out of jail space.
Soon, we, as a nation, may be faced with a justice system that convicts people and then has no place to put them.
Less than a month ago, Hamilton, county here in Ohio, paroled a violent offender almost ten years before his sentence was up ( they claimed the need to free up jail space was the reason ). In less than a week after his parole, this man robbed three women at gun point, and robbed and raped a fourth. Simply making things illegal now comes with the tag, " Where do we put those we convict ?"
You make a good point. For one thing, though, increased penalties for drunk drivers does not necessarily have to mean more jail time. Other possibilities include heavier fines (preferably adjusted to the person's income, so as to deter the well-off, not just the poor), loss of license for a longer period of time, and community service. As for the very real problem of prison over-crowding, I believe that the draconian drug laws, on both state and federal levels, are a significant cause of that problem, as well as many other problems. If we did not incarcerate minor drug offenders for ridiculously long periods of time, then there would be more room to keep violent offenders behind bars for their full sentence.
Many prisons are now privately run and are a " for profit " businesses. I'd love to know if the people in the prison business have lobbyists in Washington that promote more inmates in the system.
That would not surprise me.
I hope so to, and I also hope that people, in general, are more likely to think before they drink and drive. Today's instant comminications makes us all aware of how quick and deadly wrong a bad decision can be when driving drunk.
Sometimes the things we do to each other just stinks. Every one of use has or knows someone who has driven drunk. It's a big laugh for most people, but there's nothing funny about it.
When I was a kid, I had an uncle who drank himself to death. He was not a bad guy, in fact, he was a great guy, but the alcohol destroyed him. One of the obsticles we need to get over, as a society, is separating the alcohol from the person abusing it.
We need to get drunk drivers off the road and we need to face the fact that many of those who drive drunk are slaves to the alcohol that put them behind the wheel in the first place.
Here in Cincinnati, just a few days ago, a woman tried to stop a man from driving away from a bar, because he was too drunk to drive. The man was so drunk, he drove over the woman and killed her. Drunk driving is not good for anyone.