100 Deadly Days of Summer campaign launches WPDE
We're just days away from Memorial Day Weekend, and that means more people on the roads and more deadly accidents.
This summer, South Carolina Highway Patrol will be stepping up its enforcement of some of the most often-violated traffic laws.
Anyone who still doesn't know how drunk driving can affect people's lives needs to talk to Lisa Radvansky. In 2003, her son was a freshman at Coastal Carolina University, heading back from a ballgame after he'd been drinking, when his car went off the road and he was ejected. "My son didn't suffer the night that he died. But we suffer every day of our life because of the choices that he made," Radvansky said.
It's the kind of outcome these troopers are trying to prevent this summer. In some ways, they can see signs of progress - like fewer deaths on state roads last year.
But DUI arrests were up by nearly 3,000 cases in 2009, and troopers handed out 11,000 more citations for seatbelt violations. "The seatbelt law's been primary for almost three years now so everyone should be wearing a seatbelt, so to see that many seatbelt tickets still being written, we have a lot of people not wearing seatbelts, so we need to do better in that," said Sonny Collins, SCHP.
