“A strong smell of alcohol.”
It’s one of the first signs a law-enforcement officer will recognize upon encountering a drunk driver. In the case of two beloved siblings who were a treasured part of South Jersey’s ice hockey scene, it was also the smell of death.
NHL player Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew were killed as they bicycled in Salem County on Aug. 29. The driver who hit them – identified as Sean Higgins – was attempting to pass another vehicle and told a state trooper he had consumed “five to six beers” before the crash. He has been charged with vehicular homicide.
The “strong smell of alcohol” is all too present in New Jersey and around the country.
About one in three fatal crashes in the state involves impaired driving. Police made 26,447 DUI (Driving Under the Influence) arrests between July 2023 and June 2024, according to court data reported by New Jersey 101.5, a 1% increase from the same period a year earlier.
Even scarier is the statistic that shows in New Jersey, a DUI offender drives on average 80 times before being arrested. More than 25,000 drivers, on average, are convicted of DUI and related offenses every year.
Nationally, drunk driving killed 13,524 people in 2022, compared with 13,617 in 2021, according to statistics from MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).
“For the second year (2022), we are learning that drunk driving took the lives of more than 13,000 people,” said MADD CEO Stacey D. Stewart, “a level we had not seen since 2007. We are losing children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and people we love to tragic and avoidable crashes.”
Solutions to prevent drunk driving incorporate both common sense and technological innovations. We know we shouldn’t get behind the wheel intoxicated and to call a ride-share service instead. Groups should pick a designated driver to bring home intoxicated friends. We should call 911 upon seeing someone who appears to be drunk.
Other ways to avoid a tragedy, notes the CDC, are publicized sobriety checkpoints, a solution commonly implemented during the holidays, and large numbers of officers in a specific area.
Technically speaking, car interlocks now in use around the country measure alcohol consumption with a breath-test device connected to a vehicle’s ignition, a solution that has been successful in reducing driving while impaired (DWI) repeat offenses by about 70%.
Technology still in development includes breath and touch sensors to detect whether someone drank alcohol, as well as cameras that can monitor a person’s eye movements to tell if they’re impaired, according to Reuters. The goal is to mandate that such solutions be standard equipment in all new cars in the next few years.
“Impaired driving crashes are 100% preventable,” said NHTSA acting administrator Ann Carlson. “There’s simply no excuse or reason to drive impaired by alcohol or drugs.”
We may never know if drunk driving prevention would have saved the Gaudreau brothers. What is known is that we should be better at saving others.
