In loving memory
CRANBERRY TWP — With the July 4 weekend approaching, Cranberry Township and state law enforcement took a number of steps Thursday to increase public awareness and police officers' knowledge of the dangers of impaired driving.
With a visit from the DUI Victims Moving Memorial, law enforcement hoped to share the stories — and the personhood — of those killed by impaired drivers. The moving memorial is a traveling replica of the DUI Victims' Memorial Garden in Harrisburg, which was dedicated in 2003 and memorializes the lives of more than 2,000 people who died due to impaired drivers.
The moving memorial, which was at the Rotary Amphitheater Thursday, has, painted inside of the trailer, a full scene of the Harrisburg memorial.
“There are wooden benches, there are trees and flowers — it's a serene setting,” said Cranberry police Cpl. William Och. “There's a 25-foot vinyl wall that has all of the same names that are in Harrisburg on the actual structure.”
Present at the memorial were families of drunken and impaired driving victims, who mourned together and leaned on each other for support, Och said. That included Natalie Parkinson, whose daughter, Renee, died in 2007 after being hit by a drunken, speeding and texting driver on I-79 near the Wexford exit after watching the fireworks.
While sharing the stories of those killed by impaired drivers, law enforcement also hosted in Cranberry a training class for drug recognition.Och said 17 students graduated the drug recognition school, which started June 1 and included 10 days of classwork before the students demonstrated what they'd learned through 10 evaluations at a rehabilitation facility in Philadelphia. After the 10 evaluations, the students must come back and demonstrate what they learned in a final knowledge examination.These drug recognition experts, Och said, learn how to conduct full-blown evaluations of suspected impaired drivers that cannot be conducted by patrol officers. This consists of a 45-minute evaluation at a police station, where the experts take blood pressure and pulses and measure pupil sizes a number of times in different settings, and re-perform standard field sobriety tests in a more controlled environment.After those 45 minutes, Och said, they can determine which of seven drug categories impaired the suspect and tell the arresting officer if they need a blood test.“With the medical marijuana that we currently have, and on the horizon the recreational marijuana that's probably going to be passed, it's a growing problem on our roadways in regards to impaired driving, so these guys are going to be great assets throughout the commonwealth,” Och said.
Friday kicked off the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's impaired driving campaign for the Independence Day weekend, Och said.All jurisdictions within Butler County will participate in the campaign, he added, which includes putting as many officers out there as possible to look for impaired drivers and get them off the road.“The big message was, as everything opens up and we try to get back to some sort of sense of normalcy, we asked everybody to be responsible,” Och said. “Use a sober friend or family member, some sort of a ride-sharing app on your phone, anybody that will keep you from driving if you don't feel that it's safe to do so.”Police chief Kevin Meyer said Och's work with the county DUI taskforce is invaluable.“We're very fortunate in Cranberry Township to have Bill Och, an expert who brings the (traveling memorial) into the community and having 17 troopers and officers at the training,” Meyer said.According to the NHTSA, 1,339 drivers were killed over the July 4 holiday between 2015 and 2019, with 38% of those killed being drunk.
