Before I get too far in my victim impact… letter? Statement? I’ve asked the MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) advocate that has been working with me, especially as it relates to following of the case as the man who hit and killed him makes his way through the judicial system, if I can or will be able to read the letter to the judge or court myself, if a member of MADD in Kentucky will, or if it will simply be submitted to the judge and court system to read. I felt like asking this question was appropriate because we lived several states away from each other when the accident happened, and he was residing in Louisville, Kentucky when he was killed, within city limits no less. As it was, it took Texas months to be informed based off of his Social Security Number being reported as deceased to inform me that our son might presumptively be eligible for survivor’s benefits off of his father’s work record. I didn’t find out about any of this until February of 2024.

If I’m given the chance to read my victim impact (statement?) to the judge or court myself I’ll do it. I’m led to believe that this will probably be over Skype, Zoom, or whatever the court system uses since I live so far from Louisville. And the fact that this dude was not only drunk but high when he did what he did changed everything for me, because then it became more than just an extremely bad accident. He chose to get behind the wheel drunk, and he chose to get behind the wheel high, and had four open bottles of alcohol in his vehicle when law enforcement went through it afterward, which he was charged on all four counts for.

I should have extended that whole philosophy nearly carte blanche to the people that I went to secondary school with, excepting like three people from it. It would have saved me so much of the trouble, and wasted time spent on the majority of these people attempting to interact with me when the main problem has always been their inability to keep their mouths shut. These people plague me in their perpetual annoyances.

Some of the people that I went to high school with make me so mad I wish we had never resumed contact.

Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t allow contact with people who I went to high school with, particularly those who know my oldest son’s father. This isn’t something that I feel like I need to allow myself to be put through for the sake of my mental health. I wrote about this maybe a year to a year and a half ago if I’m not mistaken, and I’ll be damned if I say that I wasn’t right. Cutting contact with almost all of these people was and remains the best for me, and it’s continuing to look like it will be the best for me going into the future.

That’s all I can and am going to say on the matter for now… some of these people insist on bothering me.

I’m being given the opportunity to write a victim impact statement advising the court dealing with the drunk driver who killed my oldest son’s father to do… whatever I’d like them to do, and to let them know the emotional impact that losing my oldest son’s father has caused both of us (me more so than him due to his autism and intellectual disabilities, but that might be something best gotten into in a separate post in here). So far, I’ve written about two sentences and… that is it for now. I’ve been reading up on how to write these statements, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving has given me some advice on how to write the statement and who to address it to, so I’m hoping that I’ll have something halfway decent written by the time this man is sentenced, whenever that may be. All I know is that he’s in the process of going through the court system for what he did to my son’s father, and that my son’s father did not deserve to die on the side of the road at thirty-seven years of age because a drunk and high driver struck him. He may have struggled a lot in his life, and people may have been holding out hope that he would eventually get help and start… doing the right thing, but he didn’t deserve to die at the age of thirty-seven, let alone on the side of the road one evening.

This has the necklace I had made with some of my oldest son’s father’s ashes. I’m awaiting other jewelry.