Berenson Injury Law donated $5,000 to support Mothers Against Driving’s Walk Like MADD in North Texas. The event took place at its national headquarters in Irving. MADD works hard to reduce the number of drunk driving collisions on our roads.
Between its hard work and that of aggressive law enforcement, district attorneys and personal injury lawyers, our astronomical injury and fatality rate will continue to drop. This is an urgent problem in North Texas that must be addressed.
Mr. Berenson has seen far too many car and truck wrecks that were caused by a drunk or stoned driver and wants to stop them from happening.
Why has his law firm been one of the top local supporters of Mothers Against Drunk Driving for many years? Because MADD has saved 370,000 lives and the drunk driving fatality rate has decreased 50% since it was founded by the mother of a teen who died in a DWI crash in 1980.
North Texas is one of the worst places to drive in the U.S. if you want to avoid being hit by an intoxicated driver.
You may hear about high-profile celebrities like the Dallas Cowboy who was just arrested for DWI last week or another Cowboy who killed his best friend (also a Cowboy) in a car crash years when he got hammered.
But year after year, Texas leads the country in the number of fatalities from these totally avoidable collisions.
We know. Our law firm specializes in motor vehicle crashes. We have represented far too many people injured in drunk driving collisions.
We have seen the devastation that drunk driving collisions cause
They are often high-speed and head-on. A typical drunk driving crash happens at 80 – 100 miles per hour when the drunk is going the wrong way late at night — and doesn’t care.
MADD lists these sobering statistics:
- About 11,000 Americans died in a drunk driving crash in a recent year;
- Over 300,000 were injured in one – which is one person every two minutes;
- Almost 25% of people tested had illegal or drugs in their systems;
- 57% of drivers who died in crashes had alcohol and/or drugs in their blood; and
- 17% had both.
How to reduce the number of drunk driving collisions
When a driver drinks alcohol, their vision, hand-eye coordination, and judgment are diminished — and sometimes destroyed.
We recently successfully settled the lawsuit of a man who was crashed into by a drunk driver whose blood alcohol content was a shocking .28%. That is three and one-half times the allowed limit of .08%.
The man’s amount of alcohol was so high that it was off the sobriety charts. If he had been a typical 200-pound man, he could have consumed 10 alcoholic drinks (defined as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of 80 proof liquor) and still “only” have a .19% limit.
Mr. Berenson has resolved countless others over the past 41 years, including one earlier this year for the maximum amount from two insurance policies for the widow and children of a man who died on Interstate 35. We are working on several of these cases now and always seem to be.
We do not understand why it is okay to drive with alcohol in someone’s system that can easily cause a disabling wreck. At the very least, we believe that the allowable limit should be reduced to .05%. Some countries have a zero-tolerance policy.
When Mr. Berenson first started practicing injury law in Fort Worth in 1980, the limit was .10%, so things can change. And when he grew up in Nashville in the 60s, it was legal to drink at age 18.
If someone wants to drink, let them stay at home or if they are out, make them drink less. Or at least hire an Uber or get a designated driver.
We fight to recover maximum damages for their victims
We certainly hope that you or someone you know was not injured in a vehicle crash, but if you have, please contact us.
We fight for our clients. Need more information about our success rate? Here are some of our clients’ reviews.
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