The sad ripples of drunk and impaired driving

http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/LaurieRoberts/32017

Rest in peace, Gene

The number of people killed by drunk drivers in this state dropped last year. Nearly 16 percent fewer Arizonans wound up in the morgue via the bottle.

That is 63 people who are still walking around, many of them blissfully unaware that they avoided a personalized fitting for a casket.

The stats were released Thursday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. I wish Gene Targosz had had a chance to see them. He, after all, is one of the reasons why some of those 63 people are still alive.

Targosz, 67, died just five days before official word came that drunken-driving deaths in Arizona are down.

“It's hard to overestimate the impact he had,” Sen. Jim Waring told me. It was Waring who sponsored several bills that toughened Arizona's DUI laws last year.

“Without him, without Molly Steffens, without people like that, I wouldn't have been able to get those bills through,” he said. “Their personal stories are so compelling. But man, Laurie, I mean, the last two years of your life you're grieving and you're down at the Legislature all the time. He probably just died of a broken heart.”

Targosz was one of this state's most impassioned and tireless warriors against drunks who kill people. It's not that he chose the fight. Instead, it chose him on April 29, 2006.

On that day, around sunset, his son, Gilbert police Officer Rob Targosz was hit by a drunk driver who ran a red light. He died early the next morning.

Rob Targosz dedicated his life to getting drunks off the road and after he died his widow, Brigitte, and his father, Gene, vowed to carry on the work.

So I wasn't surprised to see Gene down at the Legislature, testifying about the need to strengthen DUI laws in the hope of sparing other families what his own has been forced to endure.

And sadly, I wasn't surprised to see his shock, that the liquor lobby had the power to swat away some of his attempts to change things. “There are a lot of snakes in the woodpile there,” he once told me.

I wasn't surprised that he continued messing with the woodpile, despite being snake bit several times. “We're going to go back at it again next year,” he told me in June 2007, after losing a battle to require better monitoring of DUI offenders. “We're going to go at it again. We're not going to stop.”

But I was stunned by who he enlisted to join him in the fight. When several DUI bills stalled last spring, he turned to another father for help.

Greg Fahlman, too, has seen the devastation caused by drunken driving. It was his son. Tyler, who killed Targosz's son.

It's a rare thing to see forgiveness bud from sorrow, to see a man who is entitled to be bitter instead reach out across the chasm of grief, in the belief that something decent can come from heartbreak.

To Gene, the son of a minister, it was simply the right thing to do. “I think more people need to do that…,” he told me this spring. “I feel there is a chance we can be friends. I can't bring my son back and I can't get Tyler out of jail. But we both know that in the long run, we'll help others and somehow heal the wounds.”

Gene called me a week later. The bill that had been stalled was on its way to the governor. “But there's more to be done,” he said.

Gene had a heart attack on Aug 22. He died the next morning after suffering a massive stroke. He left his earth with his mother, Anne, holding one hand and his oldest daughter, Shawn, holding the other.

He was buried beside his son.

(Column published Sept. 3, 2008, The Arizona Republic)