Drunken driver leaves wake of sorrow and debt
July 25, 1999
By Eric Newhouse
Tribune Projects Editor
It was dawn, and Scott Guess of Great Falls remembers the sky as "blue but darker than sin" as he and his wife, Juli, drove through Nevada to visit his sister in Sacramento.
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That‘s when he spotted the pickup truck heading straight toward him in the passing lane of Interstate 80. Guess slammed on his brakes, leaving 58 feet of skid marks, but the pickup driver never even slowed down.
Guess doesn‘t remember much of the head-on crash.
"I heard the words, ‘He‘s dead‘ and I thought it was me," Guess said this month. "My skull was fractured so badly that my eyes were offset by half an inch, and I was seeing four of everything."
But the paramedic was describing the condition of the pickup‘s driver. Later, police learned he had been drinking all night long.
Over the past decade, four times as many Americans died in drunken driving collisions than died in Vietnam, according to Mothers Against Drunken Driving.
In 1997, there were 16,189 people killed in alcohol-related crashes — an average of one every 32 minutes or the equivalent of two jetliners crashing each week.
Drunken driving, however, actually appears to be on the decline. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the proportion of highway deaths blamed on alcohol use has dropped from 57 percent in 1982 to 39 percent in 1997.
Aftermath of an accident
"I don‘t have anything against drinking," said Guess, "but drinking and driving is wrong.
"One person‘s choice can affect an entire community," he added, "and alcohol and gambling are on the top of my list of poor choices."
The pickup driver, Burton D. Brown, 33, of McDermitt, Nev., was killed in the wreck Aug. 25, 1990, leaving behind a widow and a grieving family. His blood alcohol concentration was .26, according to the police report of the accident.
After the wreck, Guess was conscious and in excruciating pain for an hour and 45 minutes that it took rescuers to cut him out of the wreckage of his small car.
He was in surgery for 16 hours the first time.
His sister, Tammy Donstad, drove to the hospital in Reno, but couldn‘t recognize him.
"If the nurses hadn‘t pointed him out to me, I wouldn‘t have known he was my brother," she said.
"That particular weekend, there were three others in the intensive care unit who were victims of drunk drivers," she said, "and my first thought was that drivers convicted of DUI should be required to spend time in a hospital ICU unit."
Thirteen other surgeries followed for Guess, who spent most of the next two years in hospitals.
"Scott has endured incredible pain since this tragic accident," wrote his attorney, Jim Regnier, in a letter to the Air Force seeking insurance benefits. "The multiple surgeries, the skull fractures, the migraine headaches have never left Scott without one day of pain."
Medical bills were more than a quarter million dollars for him and his wife, Juli, who was hospitalized for three weeks with a severely broken leg, collapsed lung and other injuries.
"That accident will affect the rest of my life," she said, "because I will always have to worry about having a rod in my leg."
Regnier estimated potential damages of the accident at $930,000.
"It ruined me financially," said Guess, adding that his $100,000 Air Force policy didn‘t come close to meeting even medical expenses.
The accident ended Guess‘ career as a telephone installer at Malmstrom Air Force Base. He now is retired on half pay.
Life-altering event
It ended the care-free days of hunting, skiing and playing basketball or racquetball, although he does referee elementary school soccer games now.
And, he says, it ended his marriage.
"I don‘t blame my ex-wife," he said. "It was hard for her to hear the doctors say that I would never walk again."
But Juli Buchanan, who has since remarried, said she and Scott would probably have divorced anyway — the accident just hastened the process.
"Right after the accident, I had to be away from Scott for so long because he was in the hospital," she said. "When he got out, he thought he had been given another life and he went another direction.
"But he was a lot closer to death than I was," she said, "so that‘s understandable."
For a long time, she said, she was unable even to talk about the accident without bursting into tears.
Naturally, that affected her whole family. Her father, in particular, was angry about the accident and at the drunken driver.
"It was my dad and my mom who were here with me when Scott was not," said Buchanan, "and it was my dad who saw me all cut up and hobbling around on crutches."
The Guess family was equally devastated.
"It still upsets my mother because Scott can‘t do the physical things he used to do — even though he‘s doing things they never thought he would be able to do again," said Donstad. "And my father just won‘t talk about it."
She was on the phone daily with her parents, racking up bill that exceeded $500 that first month alone.
She said she took a two-month unpaid leave of absence to be with her brother in Reno, where her weekly motel bill exceeded her monthly apartment rent back in Sacramento.
"It‘s amazing how people you don‘t even know can have such a dramatic impact on your life," said Donstad.
Friends, family all suffer
And it has affected the community of which Guess is a part.
"He and I used to play a lot of basketball together, just one-on-one," remembered his friend Mike Allison. "He‘d come over to my parents‘ place, we‘d work a little bit, then frequently we‘d play basketball until 1 or 2 in the morning."
The Guesses were not quite done painting their house in Great Falls when the accident occurred. Allison, numb, went over to finish the touchup.
"It was like it happened to our family," added his wife, Wendy Allison. "We just had a sick-to-the-stomach heartache."
The next trauma was when Guess finally got out of the hospitals.
"He looked like death warmed over," said Wendy Allison. "He was so skinny that his eyes were sunken back in his head."
The Allisons sought counseling from Jeff Beazley, then pastor of the First Baptist Church in Great Falls. So did Guess.
"After the accident, his whole life caved in," said Beazley, now pastor of the Absarokee Evangelical Church. "Things had been going pretty good for him, but that accident took the air out of his tire."
For ministers and health-care providers, that‘s a fairly common scenario. Vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among people under 34 years old in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and nearly half of them involve alcohol.
Risk keeps increasing
Alcohol interferes with psychomotor skills, such as brain-hand coordination, and with cognitive skills, such as information processing. A driver‘s risk of being involved in a fatal crash nearly doubles with each percentage increase in blood alcohol content.
BACs as low as 0.02 can impair a driver‘s ability to divide his or her attention between two or more tasks.
BACs ranging from 0.03 to 0.05 interfere with voluntary eye movement and make it more difficult to track a moving object, such an oncoming car.
BACs of more than 0.05 significantly diminish reaction time and information processing.
A BAC of 0.1 is legally drunk in Montana and many other states, although there has been a push to drop that limit to 0.08.
The U.S. Justice Department says the number of drivers increased by 15 percent between 1986 and 1997, but the number of DUI arrests declined by almost 18 percent, from 1.8 million in 1986 to 1.5 million in 1997.
As a result, it said, the arrest rate for drunken driving declined about 28 percent, from 1,124 arrests per 100,000 population in 1986 to 809 per 100,000 population in 1997.
Guess has since remarried. He and his wife, Taya, have two children of their own, and he has adopted her two children from a previous marriage.
Although he has built a new life, he feels his future was stolen.
"I live with constant pain that never goes away," he said.
"And I know that life will bring me back to a wheelchair soon, as soon as the arthritis kicks in," he said. "So I‘m living in the prime of my life right now. I have to make the most of it."
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