New Info on Taconic Parkway Drunk Driver -- Our Sister's Keeper

The harm she caused was unspeakably catastrophic. Her secret addictions, and her apparent inability to seek help to overcome them, caused Diane Schuler, her daughter, her brother's three children and three men coming the other way to perish on New York's Taconic Parkway one sunny afternoon last July. Schuler was driving the wrong way down the Hudson Valley highway. A staggering percentage of alcohol content and THC were discovered in her blood at autopsy. The preventability of the crash becomes more unambiguous with the release of a police report that, in the hours before the head-on collision, witnesses twice spotted Mrs. Schuler vomiting on the side of the road next to her red minivan, presumably with 5 small children in the car watching.

Schuler's husband and her brother, both undoubtedly bereft, insist they knew little of Diane's substance abuse prior to the tragedy. According to her family this was the first time that the young mother messed up. It seems that nobody in her family knew how badly the desperate housewife needed help.

Schuler's public behavior had been exemplary, her husband says. Maybe he really didn't know; other elements of the intoxicated driver's life were apparently outwardly functional, and denial is a powerful distorter. Though his sister Joan told the district attorney's people her sister-in-law was a frequent pot smoker, perhaps in willful ignorance, Daniel Schuler believed his 34-year-old wife's pot use was harmless and only occasional. Maybe Diane's friends, and the parents of children who played with her 2-year-old girl and 5-year-old son (who miraculously survived the crash), never caught a slurred word or a missed obligation.

The family of the other car's victims have filed a civil claim alleging that those who supplied the drunken woman with alcohol are "accessories to homicide." All told there is plenty of blame to go around. Witnesses also told police the suburban mom was "zigzagging" in traffic. I'm sure their observations will help the accident investigators assess damage, but I have to wonder just a bit about the witnesses themselves.

I understand they were total strangers but these folks saw a woman in distress vomiting on the road next to a kidmobile yet failed to approach her or find out if the woman needed some kind of help. Not only would that have been the right thing to do, the gesture of kindness might have saved 8 lives.