Every day at dusk, two candle-like lights click on in each of her bedroom
windows, providing a comforting glow.
Some of the white wicker furniture has been handed down to her younger
sister, Sarah, but her bed with the purple and white gingham comforter
remains. Her swimsuits and letter jacket still hang behind closet doors she
decorated with Beatles pictures. And atop a chest filled with friends'
letters and photographs sit her car keys.
For the first time in 2 1/2 years, Peggy Matzdorf recently pulled up the
blinds, pushed open the windows and let some fresh air circulate in her
dead daughter Alli's bedroom.
Naperville resident Alli Matzdorf and two of her Waubonsie Valley High
School friends, Jennifer Roberts and Jenni Anderson, were killed 2 1/2 years
ago by drunken driver Randall J. Visor. Visor's passenger, 27-year-old Ana
Pryor, also was killed in the Aurora crash.
Only recently, Peggy Matzdorf's life has returned to a semblance of
normalcy. She drops Sarah off at her lifeguard job. She grabs groceries at
the neighborhood Jewel.
But Peggy Matzdorf's life never will be the same.
She leaves Sarah at the pool with a promise to join her there often "with my
eyes on her." She hands her check to the Jewel clerk and that familiar
searing pain sucks her breath away as the clerk looks at it and asks if she
is Alli's mom.
The experiences follow a similar path for other survivors.
Edna Roberts, Jim Still, Leah Johnson and Denise Wright all have had their
lives transformed by the pain drunken drivers parked upon them. Routines
return, but nothing is normal. And in the time it takes for metal to carve
into metal, the survivors find themselves unwilling authorities, aching
activists against drunken driving.
"Give the maximums, not the minimums," offers Edna Roberts, a schoolteacher
and the mother of Jennifer Roberts. And the maximum sentences for drunken
driving are not long enough. Judges need to be tougher. People need to
become more responsible and own up to their actions, she says.
"If someone would've asked me five years ago, I wouldn't even know how to
answer" about drunken driving sentences, Roberts observes. Five years
later, Roberts finds herself listening to one of her 8-year-old students
tell her she left flowers at Jennifer's grave after doing the same for her
grandfather.
Naperville resident Leah Johnson's daughter, Laura, was killed 15 years ago
by a drunken driver when she was minutes from home.
Johnson tailed the killer once, found him in a bar, and hounded authorities
until he was re-sentenced for violating his work-release conditions.
For the past several years, Johnson has collected driving record
information on repeat drunken drivers and hopes one day to post them on a
Web site. She continues to try to drum up financial and other support for
Citizens' Outcry, a Glen Ellyn-based anti-DUI organization she started to
monitor judges and educate people about repeat drunken drivers.
Fifteen years after her daughter's death, "public rage" is Johnson's goal.
How should society deal with drunken drivers? "A life for a life," she says.
Laura has spoken from beyond the grave, Johnson insists, telling her "I want
you to stop the killing."
Seventeen-year-old Naperville resident Denise Wright remembers sitting in a
Denver courtroom listening as Roberto Mendoza-Ruiz pleaded with a judge to
spare him from the maximum sentence because he had a family to support.
Wright remembers the anger building inside her.
Mendoza-Ruiz was legally drunk when his truck crossed the center lane and
plowed directly into the car that carried Denise's sister, Michelle Wright,
then 19, and three friends.
Afterward, Mendoza-Ruiz tried to restart his truck and leave, according to
reports from a police officer and another crash witness.
He had a reason for wanting to flee: Two days earlier Mendoza-Ruiz had been
convicted of driving drunk.
In a letter to the judge, witness R.W. Flubacker described the worst of what
he saw inside the victims' car:
"I found the young woman, Michelle Wright, lying diagonally across the car
with her head in the driver's compartment. On this cold November night,
there was no steam from her breath, only the steam rising from her body."
Denise Wright keeps a copy of that 1991 letter. Mendoza-Ruiz got the maximum
penalty in Colorado: 24 years in prison.
Wright knows she, her parents and her sister, Susan, were "fortunate" that
Michelle's killer got the maxi-mum sentence. But it still doesn't seem like
enough.
"I think there should be something that goes along with it," she says. "He
should have to carry around my sister's picture in his wallet."
Some people may think 24 years is severe. "I don't think so because it's so
preventable," Wright says. "It's totally preventable."
Wright will join other high school students in Washington, D.C., this fall
to brainstorm ways to keep teens from drinking and driving. She has definite
ideas about repeat drunken drivers.
"It should be totally embarrassing to have a DUI," she says. Put a tag on
their cars that says "DUI" or give them special plates, she suggests.
"I think that's reasonable. Nobody's going to want to do it if that
happens, so then they'd stop doing it."
Oswego resident Jim Still, a teacher and football and basketball coach at
Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, came close to quitting it all.
Every school day he used to have to drive twice past the place where he
saw the mangled cars and an ambulance speeding his younger brother, Jeff,
to the hospital, back in 1997. Every school day he had to walk past the
classroom, two doors down from his own, where Jeff taught.
Still, on Sundays, when he and his wife and two toddler sons visit his
parents in Sugar Grove, his mom and dad hug him - hard and long.
"There was no escaping it," he says. "It got hard to breathe."
Somehow, after a lot of prayers, the sensation of suffocation eased. Now he
speaks to groups about his experience alongside Mary Ann Fornek, the woman
who killed his brother, served 20 months in prison and is completing the
rest of a four-year term on parole.
Though Still says he has forgiven Fornek, who was a first-time DUI offender,
he remains angry about how most drunken drivers and repeat drunken drivers
are handled.
First-time drunken driving offenders should lose their licenses for a year
or two even if no one is hurt. "Why not? They could've killed somebody.
Lucky for us, they got pulled over," Still says. "What's curbing their
behavior? Nothing."
Randall J. Visor's behavior now is being curbed behind walls at the
Taylorville Correctional Center in central Illinois.
He was sentenced to two 13-year concurrent terms for two counts of reckless
homicide after the crash that killed the three high-school girls and a young
mother.
With good behavior credits, corrections department records indicate he
could be released after serving five years and three months. That is less
than 17 months' time for each life lost.
Visor's projected release date is three years away - 2003. That's the year
Jenni Anderson, Jennifer Roberts and Allison Matzdorf likely would have
graduated from college.
"We're living with a life sentence," Edna Roberts says.
Back in that bedroom on Naperville's Bainbridge Drive where the letter
jacket, swimsuits and car keys sit, the candle lights flicker off. It is the
dawn of another day.
