A young driver, apparently under the influence, jumps a curb and strikes a young woman walking on a sidewalk, badly breaking one of her legs on the day she was set to begin her final semester as a dance major at Utah Valley University.
If this were an unheard-of crime, it would be a horrible thing, but this incident in Utah County came on a day when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a study showing an estimated 17 million people have driven while intoxicated at least once during the course of a year on streets and highways in the United States. That makes what happened to Catherine Joy Smith-Warner part of an ongoing national tragedy — a senseless epidemic of reckless self-indulgence.
Smith-Warner is fortunate. She will live. Many other similar victims do not survive.
The UVU student's alleged assailant, 22-year-old Justin Thomas Hicken, has been in trouble for this sort of thing before. On July 20, he was arrested for driving off the road in a similar manner, although he didn't hit anyone, police said.
In recent years, Utah lawmakers have passed tough laws against drunken and impaired driving. Urged on by activists, they have tried to put a dent in the idea that an offense in which no one is hurt should be treated seriously because the offender should be stopped before he or she injures someone. They have tried to stop the leniency that leads to long DUI rap sheets that seem to escape detection.
But that didn't stop the Utah Senate majority leader from being arrested earlier this year on suspicion of DUI. It didn't keep another Utah County woman from being convicted earlier this month of DUI for the seventh time in 21 years, and from receiving a sentence of only 210 days in jail, three years' probation and a small fine.
Utah has among the lowest rates of drunken driving in the nation. And yet we doubt Smith-Warner and her family find much comfort in that statistic.
The report from the National Highway Safety Administration found that 8 percent of all drivers during the past year got behind the wheel of a car at least once even though they believed they were drunk. In addition, 20 percent said they had driven within two hours of consuming alcohol. And 8 percent also said they had accepted a ride from someone they suspected of being drunk. Among males ages 21-24, that figure rose to 24 percent.
That may be the most troubling finding of all. Laws and public service campaigns can be effective, but they can do only so much. To put a stop to the national tragedy, the American culture needs to begin universally seeing drunken driving as a horrible thing that should not be tolerated, even among friends or relatives.
The trends are heading in the right direction. People no longer laugh at portrayals of "lovable drunks" on stage or in theaters. The age of comedian Foster Brooks is long gone. The national survey also found that 81 percent of Americans see drunken driving as a serious public safety threat.
It will apparently take more than that to ensure there aren't any more random tragedies like the one that struck Smith-Warner this week.