Alcohol kills

I lost another client three weeks ago. Not even 60 years old.  Perhaps I should have anticipated this.  The signs were there.  He had two accidents within a few years and very high BACs.  I mean VERY high.  But I believed him when he told me he had been in rehab for 28 days and sober for over a year.  When I saw him in court this spring he seemed sober.  I never noticed any indication if he was still drinking.  Yet when he went to jail for a week his ex-wife called me to say she had  been receiving bizarre texts from him in the jail.  But when I called the jail they said he had been released.  He apparently ended up in the hospital.  Did he end up in the hospital because he went into withdrawal in the jail?  He denied that when I last saw him in July. He minimized what I had heard from his ex-wife and convinced me everything was fine.  It wasn’t.  I think he just wanted the government to leave him alone.  Three weeks ago I found out he died in a fall.

While the vast majority of DUIs do not involve people as sick as my client apparently was, I recommend an appropriate level of education/treatment for all my clients.  If you can’t stop drinking – get help.