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110 | 9 Leigh and Jenny Lives Interrupted Facts of the case: In May 2001, a drunk driver killed eighteenyear -old Cameron. Jenny, the driver, was nineteen years old when she crashed into Cameron’s car, having run a red light at eighty-two miles per hour. Her blood-alcohol concentration was 0.14. She pled guilty and was convicted of first-degree vehicular homicide (which carries up to five years of imprisonment). She received three years in prison and two years of house arrest, though she served less because of good-time credits earned. I interviewed Cameron’s mother, Leigh, Kim, and Debbie (the volunteer facilitator who worked on the case with Kim) and had access to the case files, the letters exchanged, and the videotape of the dialogue. I was unable to interview Jenny. Leigh has presented in my university classes twice, and I have also corresponded and talked with her many times. When Leigh talks about her son, her whole face lights up. Cameron was special—a bright, inquisitive young man who loved snowboarding, his girlfriend , his family, and his friends. He was the middle child of three children and had a unique ability to size up a situation, silently, before deciding how he fit into it and what he wanted to do. Remembering how special he was gives Leigh some happiness when she reflects back to that dark time, in 2001, when a drunk driver killed Cameron. He was eighteen years old, about to graduate from high school, when a nineteen-year-old young woman plowed into his car at an intersection early one morning.1 Leigh and Cam’s father, Gary, got a divorce when their daughter was six, Cam was nine, and their oldest son was thirteen. It was an amicable divorce, and Leigh felt that they had settled into the two-family mode very comfortably . Cam did well in school, and his teachers commented on how bright he was. Leigh said, “He was just a nice kid and very devoted to his sister—but a good kid just like everybody else: he made good choices and bad choices.” Leigh and Jenny | 111 Cameron was an avid snowboarder and applied to colleges out west so he could snowboard. About two and a half weeks before he died, he went out to visit the schools, finally deciding on the University of Utah. After a great deal of discussion, Leigh and Gary decided to let Cam postpone college for a semester so he could follow his dream to travel, a decision that made him “the happiest kid you have ever seen.” The Night of the Crash The weekend of May 4, 2001, Cameron was supposed to stay at his dad’s house, but his sister and her friends were over there too, so a few minutes after midnight Friday night, he walked in the door of Leigh’s house. As Leigh was going upstairs to go to bed, she said, “‘Love you dearly, Cam.’ And he said, ‘Love you too, Mom,’” Leigh did not know that those would be the last words she would hear from her son. That night, at 2 a.m., Leigh was awakened by a phone call that jarred her out of a deep sleep. She was home alone, and a voice on the other end of the phone wascallingfromthehospital.OncethewomanverifiedLeigh’sname,sheasked, “Do you have a son named Cameron?” The caller told Leigh that he had been in a serious accident and that she needed to get someone to drive her to the hospital . Her mind was blank, and she could not absorb it all. She called Gary, her oldest son, and a few friends and told them to get to the hospital right away. When Leigh walked in, she strode up to the desk, announced who she was, and demanded to be taken to her son. She thought at the time they would take her to his room, and she would “pull the curtain back, and there he’d be, and I’d talk to him and tell him it would be okay.” But when she saw her ex-husband and daughter sobbing, she knew he was dead. “I just fell down and cried and screamed because I lost my son, and he had been in such a good place in his life, the best place.” All they knew from the police was that Cam had been killed in a wreck and that someone else hit his car. At the time...

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