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If I hear, “Well at least nobody was hurt.” One more time this week I’m going to scream. It was all well and good the first 24 hours or so post DUI incident (no, I will not call it an accident because there was a level of intent there when this kid got behind the wheel that night). Maybe he didn’t mean to hurt anyone else, but he made very poor choices and his decisions have now caused us harm. I imagine that from the looks of his history and his Facebook page he’s not suffering. He was released from jail with a promise to appear. He even got his license back. He lives at home with mommy and daddy so he’s all good. No bills to pay or kids to feed.
And from where I sit right now, “At least nobody was hurt” means well there’s no victim here. The DA hasn’t called us up to inform us of what’s happening or to get any sort of statement from us about how we’re doing. Nobody seems to care that my husband and I haven’t slept for days. Nobody was hurt. Well, I guess that depends on your standards of hurt. Did we suffer any physical injury in this? No, probably not really. I mean I’m sure my blood pressure is through the roof so if you want to count that as a physical injury I guess there’s that. I also wanted to vomit when the insurance adjuster was out today to appraise our car and look at the damages. That’s pretty physical. But I get the impression that that doesn’t count. That doesn’t matter.
After the punk’s insurance company left and claimed that they would consider it totaled because despite a value of nearly $7000 and the inability to tell me what it would cost to fix it or what the value of the car had to be for them to not consider it not totaled they are refusing to repair the car. I lost it. I have been crying off and on all day now. Over a car mind you, yes. It’s not so much that I’m this distraught over the loss of a possession, I am grateful it wasn’t my children or my husband who was lost, but my mind can’t help but wander to the what ifs. I couldn’t imagine having to fight with insurance while grieving for someone I loved. And what all this means is we go back to being a one car family through no fault of our own. At a time mind you when we are on the verge of having a 3rd driver in the house. My oldest is moments away from getting her license. We lose income. We’ve already lost income. We are absolutely on the losing end of the stick here because we parked our car legally, in front of our home, just like we’ve done everyday for the last year and a half. We did everything right, but we have had nothing but stress and aggravation for the last several days.
I had no choice, but to involve our insurance company in this matter. I was getting no where with the punk’s. So this really drags it all out longer, but I feel like I have no choice. We cannot afford to have no car. We cannot afford for them to not pay for this to be repaired. I figured I had to try. I had to try to see if my insurance would view this situation differently than the punk’s insurance company does.
There are victims in this situation even if people did not get killed or injured, physically. His actions have done a great deal of arm to not only us financially, but emotionally as well. Just to have a consultation with an attorney we have to pay at least $300 an hour because they don’t consider this personal injury. If we want to file against him in small claims that’s $95 right there. I personally think we have a pretty good case for punitive damages, but we’d probably never see the money and we’d be out of pocket so much it’s not something we financially are capable of doing.
When I was probably in middle school I remember writing a paper about drunk driving and MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving). We’re talking over 20 years ago. From what I remember back then the laws were improving slightly, but here we are more than 20 years later and this kid who now has committed his 2nd offense that we know of is out of jail just a day later. How is this possible in 2016 in a DUI case? Simply because “nobody was hurt”? I’m just sick to my stomach about all of this. To add insult to injury I think I saw the kid at the grocery store tonight. I wasn’t sure that it was him, but it sure looked like him. If I could have positively known it was him I probably would have screamed at him. I want this over. I want to get back to life. My home and my work is suffering while I deal with this because apparently dealing with insurance claims is a full time job.
