THE DEADLIEST COCKTAIL
Gasoline, booze don't mix, say grieving Los Gatos family, CHP

LOS GATOS It could happen to anybody. It did happen to Judy Peckler.

On a bright Saturday morning last January, two investigators from the Santa
Clara County coroner's office knocked on the front door of her house in Los
Gatos and handed her a piece of paper.

In dry language, it told Peckler that she had lost half of her family the
night before: Two of her children and her husband were dead. The California
Highway Patrol says they were killed by a drunken driver.

On Friday, January 17, the Pecklers became three more numbers in America's
most gruesome statistic the 17,000 or so people who are killed each year
by drunken drivers.

``It's so important that people understand this was a choice by someone to
risk his life and the lives of others,'' Peckler says of the pickuptruck
driver who crossed over the line and plowed into the Peckler family's sport
utility vehicle.

``My family was completely helpless and innocent.'' Almost one year later,
the Peckler house is brightly decorated for Christmas. Four stockings hang
from the mantle, one for each child Jana and Jennifer, who are still
alive, and Jill and Jeff, who are not.

In the dining room are three large ``memory boards,'' for the two dead
children and her husband. Each board is crowded with dozens of snapshots
spanning their lives.

But Christmas at the Peckler house this year was silent the wounds are
still too fresh.

Peckler remembers the moment when she was handed the coroner's fax. It had
her husband's full name, James Edward Peckler, and referred to the two
other occupants of the car as ``Jane Doe'' and ``John Doe.''

In the surreal shock of the moment, Peckler says, ``I walked (the
investigators) up to my family portraits, and I said, `These are not Jane
Doe and John Doe. These are my children.' ''

James Peckler was 52, a successful real estate investor and widely known
volunteer in the tightly knit Los Gatos community. He was a fundraiser for
the high school's athletic teams; he helped out at The Teen Center and the
Los Gatos Educational Foundation; and he played on or coached many local
softball and basketball recreational teams.

Jill Peckler was an AllAmerican runner at the University of California at
Davis, where she held a 3.8grade point average as a premed major. She was
21.

Jeff Peckler was a 15yearold freshman at Los Gatos High School, a kid
known for his boundless sense of humor and enthusiasm.

In the space of six seconds, the father and his two younger kids, happily
heading for a ski weekend, became three mangled bodies in the wreckage of a
GMC ``Jimmy'' sport utility vehicle.

James, Jill and Jeff had been heading south at about 50 mph on Highway 267
toward Northstar, the ski resort near Lake Tahoe. Coming north at about 70
mph was Robert Philip Scott, driving his Ford F250 pickup truck with his
brother riding in the truck bed behind him.

The crash happened so fast that there was no chance of escape, no possible
turning away at the last second. The Pecklers were killed instantly; so was
Scott's brother.

The CHP and the Placer County district attorney say Scott's blood alcohol
content was nearly three times the legal limit. He had been convicted three
years earlier of drunken driving.

The crash of Scott's truck into the Pecklers' GMC was so horrendous the
combined speed of the vehicles was close to 100 mph at impact that the
CHP called in its elite Multidisciplinary Accident Investigation Team.

Although the CHP declined to talk about the case officially, citing pending
litigation, a highly placed CHP official agreed to discuss some aspects of
the crash on condition of anonymity.

Asked how the severity of the PecklerScott crash compared with that of the
other cases he has seen, the official said, ``From my perspective, they're
all important cases. But this one, as far as the sequence of events and
loss of life go, is as serious an event as we've investigated.''

In 1996, alcohol was involved in 17,126 traffic fatalities across the
United States booze, beer and wine accounted for 41 percent of the
41,907 people killed on the roadways.

Every halfhour, by the estimate of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, somebody
is killed by a drunken driver.

MADD attacks the DUI problem as if it were a war, relentlessly pounding
away at state and federal legislators and demanding tougher laws. Each
year, around this time, the organization gears up for the annual holiday
onslaught of DUI collisions and exhorts police and politicians to step up
their efforts to save lives.

Their message may be getting through.

The people out on the frontlines of the DUI wars police and highway
patrol officers, judges and attorneys say that in the past 15 years,
tougher laws, sobriety checkpoints, education and relentless publicity have
contributed to what experts call a change in the way we think about drunken
driving.

Drunken driving deaths have been reduced from 57 percent of all highway
fatalities in 1982 and leveled off at about 41 percent, a figure that has
remained steady for the past three years.

``I think the whole culture of drinking and driving is no longer
acceptable,'' said Jeffrey Gunther, a Sacramento Superior Court judge who
has heard his share of DUI cases. ``That old thing we used to see `Wink,
wink, we all drink and drive' is no longer acceptable.''

Gunther has become well known in the DUI world for his special brand of
justice, known as The Gunther Special, what some lawyers call ``Kids and
Cadavers.''

``I prefer to call it the `youthful visitation program,' '' says Gunther.
``It's for youth under the age of 21, and I wanted them to see firsthand
what this is all about.''

When Gunther sentences young DUI offenders, he orders them assigned to
latenight Friday and Saturday shifts at the trauma ward of UC Davis
Medical Center, where most of Sacramento's serious traffic injuries are
taken. There they watch as the crash victims are wheeled in.

``Then they go to the coroner's office, and they get shown the victims of
DUI. They're in a freezer cold as ice, and these victims are blue and
they're white,'' Gunther says.

The young offenders, by now a little chastened, Gunther says, also get to
hear some MADD mothers talk ``nonjudgmentally about what happened to them.
They talk about getting that knock on the door to learn that some family
member has been killed and how their life has been changed.''

Karolyn Nunnallee, the incoming national president of MADD, who lost her
10yearold daughter to a drunken driver, says the following measures can
help cut down, if not eliminate, drunken driving:

Tougher legislation, particularly in lowering the permissible blood
alcohol content to .08 percent in every state. To date, only 15 states
(including California) have done this.

Educating the public that ``alcohol and gasoline don't mix. They cause
death and injury. We've become complacent about drinking and driving, and
the alcohol industry paints a picture that you can't have a good time
without alcohol.''

Sobriety checkpoints, a proven deterrent.

In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, heavily publicized checkpoints
during the holiday season have reduced alcoholrelated injuries by 76
percent in the past 23 years.

As for drunken driving fatalities during the threeweek holiday period,
there have been none in Santa Clara County for the past two years and none
in San Mateo County for the past six years.

For Judy Peckler, the changes in her life since January 17 came about with
a certain numbing regularity each month had one anniversary or another.
In March, ``We had our shared birthday Jim and I and that's gone.''

Then there was Mother's Day, then Father's Day, then Jill's graduation ceremony.

In October, Jana was married in a ceremony that her father had spent months
planning.

``We went ahead anyway,'' Peckler said, ``without her father walking her
down the aisle, without her sister as maid of honor and without her brother
as a groomsman.''

In a cemetery not 10 minutes from the Peckler home, Judy Peckler rearranged
the flowers on her family's collective gravestone the other day and brushed
away some leaves.

On the gravestone is written:

The music of your laughter

The compassionate lyrics of your lives

Silenced by a drunk driver

Will sing in our hearts forever.

In May, the Placer County grand jury indicted Scott on four counts of
seconddegree murder. He is being held in the Placer County jail on
$500,000 bail.

His attorney, Placer County Public Defender Leonard Tauman, declined to
discuss his client's case or to allow Scott, 36, to be interviewed.

On the night of the crash, a CHP official said, Scott and his brother ``had
had a fight, and it was their practice that when that happened, they
wouldn't ride in the cab together. So the brother rode in the bed of the
truck.''

After the crash, 39yearold James Scott, the brother, was found dead in
the middle of the debris.

A profile of the driver, drawn up in cases like these, shows a pattern of
drugs and alcohol abuse, the CHP official said.

``His lifestyle, from what we can reconstruct, is that of the addicted
personality. He lives basically for his alcohol and his drugs. He works, he
drinks, he uses drugs, and he has sex. You see a lot of that kind of
personality in this kind of accident. It's a lifestyle and history of
someone who will wind up killing themselves or someone else. And he did.''

A recent study by the Los Angelesbased Century Council, an antidrunken
driving group funded by leading distilleries, found that repeat DUI
offenders may drive under the influence more than 1,000 times before they
are caught. The study also showed that in 1995, drivers who had been
drinking before they died had blood alcohol levels of 0.15 or higher
nearly twice the California limit.

Scott's trial is scheduled to start in Placer County Superior Court, in
Auburn, on February 10.

With clinically detailed descriptions of how the Pecklers died and big,
blownup photographs of the crushed GMC, the testimony and evidence will
bombard the three surviving Pecklers with fact upon gruesome fact of the
horrendous crash.

Nevertheless, Judy Peckler said she will ``be there every day, and I will
bring my daughters.''

``I want the driver to know that I'm there, and I want the jury to see the
family that's been destroyed.''