Any person who drinks and drives is responsible for the havoc/property loss/ and possible deaths that might result from that action. CTN has been following the trial of Rebecca Grossman, whose lawyers on Friday sought to dismiss murder charges against her in the 2020 hit-and-run deaths of two boys.
The judge denied the motion. Grossman, 60, is charged with two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and one count of hit-and-run driving resulting in death in connection with the collision.
Although she was not charged with driving under the influence, breathalyzer test at the scene showed that Grossman had a blood alcohol level of about 0.075%; a blood test three hours later came back at 0.08%, California’s legal limit. Valium was also found in her system.
Then a DUI hit closer to home.
Saturday, February 10, at 2:18 a.m., CTN received a text from a niece that lives next to this editor’s mother Noma Sazama, 94, in South Dakota. “Sorry for the late/early text. Grandma is fine; her house is not.”
A wall of a home was taken out by a drunk driver.
Noma added, “Car versus house. Driver is in police custody. DUI.”
It appears the driver mistook the house driveway for a street and sped up on it, hitting the house, which caused the car to spin out and ended up west of the house in the yard that Noma uses for a garden.
Her bedroom was in the north part of her house. Noma heard a loud noise that woke her up. She thought originally it might be thunder, so she got out of her bed and looked out her north window, then her west window. When she didn’t see anything, she got back in bed, and then thought, maybe she should look out front.
She went about five feet up her hallway that leads to the front door. It was then she saw part of the wall of her house was gone and she couldn’t go any further because of the clutter. All of the furniture and the siding of the house had been pushed towards her bedroom.
Her daughter Barb, who had captured the accident on a video surveillance camera, immediately alerted the police. They took the driver, a woman, in her 30s into custody.
Neighbors and friends, a carpenter Scott Larson and his wife, Carrie, started working immediately in the early a.m. to secure the house and fix the hole. The back door blew off its hinges with the impact and the couple worked to fix it, too, so it would close.
With help from the family, Barb relocated Noma to her home, while the repairs were going on. The nighttime temperatures are between 9 and 27 degrees, so staying in the home would not have been possible.
“I just cleaned my house today,” Noma told this editor, saying there was foam, dirt, and wood everywhere. Then she reflected on the positive, “Well, at least I didn’t clean my floors.”
Noma later wrote in a text, “My new couch that you kids gave me has a hole in the side and the frame is bent, so it’s not usable. One of the wooden chairs has a rip in the cushion, a framed picture had the glass broken, two end tables were destroyed, a floor lamp was bent and is not usable.
But on the positive side, she is okay and “none of my snowmen were injured and my rose-stained glass survived.”
Most of the living room furniture was damaged, but the snowmen came out unscathed.
Drunk driving is such a scourge. One night in Mar Vista where I used to live on Colonial Ave my husband and I heard a loud series of bangs. Running outside front we saw a drunk driver weaving down the street hitting every single parked car on each side of the street. My husband got in his car and followed her. She ended up at the liquor store 2 blocks away in her completely battered car. As she tried to get out and go in to buy more liquor my husband convinced her to let him hold her car keys. He then gave them to the liquor store owner who was calling the police. We never found out what happened next and all the cars on 3 blocks were damaged one way or the other. My husband left his name and contact but noone ever called us as witnesses.