“I wanted people to know this could happen to anybody,” says Tracy Leal, a mother who lost her daughter in a drunk driving accident, as T.J. Aulds reports for the Daily News. Leal is referring to those who are arrested for DWI; she saw that many of the arrestees were people she knew in the town of Texas City and in Galveston County.
“Some friends and my family are really proud of me. There are other people who aren’t so proud.” The “other people” are certainly those who are either arrested for DWI themselves or who are friends or family of those arrested.
What Leal does, as Aulds reports, is scour Web databases for the mug shots of people arrested for drunk driving; she goes to Galveston County police agencies and finds the pictures – many pictures end up being of someone she knows personally – and then posts them on a Facebook page.
Yet, even if the pictures are of those she knows herself, she won’t take them off Facebook.
In a rare turn of events, Leal admits to driving under the influence herself in the past. “There were times I wasn’t sober, but was the most sober among us after being out and I would drive.”
In Texas (as elsewhere), getting behind the wheel after drinking puts you not only at risk of getting arrested for DWI, it also puts you at risk of getting into a car wreck, and seriously injuring someone or, worse, killing them. This opens you up to significant tort liability, not to mention criminal punishment.
Source: The Daily News, “Parent uses social media to expose DWI charges,” by T.J. Aulds, 12/31/11