Agony, Anger Spur Head of MADD : Escondido Mother of Victim Zeroes In on Drunk Drivers

“I get anonymous phone calls. From a mystery woman,” Norma Phillips said.

“Every once in a while this woman calls me up to tell me what the drunk driver who crashed into my son’s truck has been doing lately.”

Phillips, who last fall was elected national president of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), is extremely interested in what that driver has been doing lately. She said she can’t mention his name because her family has been legally warned not to persecute him.

“But I can say that his borrowed Rolls-Royce smashed into Dean’s truck, at about 80 miles an hour, on the wrong side of a Warner Springs road,” she said.

Died in Crash

That was on Thanksgiving night, 1981. Dean Phillips, 24, died in the crash. So did his passenger, 20-year-old Leticia Crosthwaite. The cab of the truck was so badly crumpled that it took three hours to pry their bodies out.

“Because Dean had been driving in a convoy,” Phillips said, “a dozen of his friends were standing by the roadside as the man whose name I can’t say was pulled out of his Rolls-Royce. And all he could say was: ‘I guess I had too much to drink.’ ”

Phillips was speaking in her office. It is a comfortable room; more like a living room than an office. A bright flutter of family snapshots covers the bulletin board. Her 12-year-old poodle was asleep, snoring gently, under the desk.

Figures from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Division of Prevention show that, at the current rate, one out of two people will be involved in an alcohol-related crash. Somebody dies every 23 minutes because somebody else gets behind the wheel after drinking too much.

“I was horrified when I heard those statistics,” Phillips said. She was also horrified when, with her husband, Harold, and Leticia Crosthwaite’s parents, she spent a year going back and forth to court and became convinced that the judicial system often protects drivers who drink “far more than it does the rights of their victims.”

She remembers sitting in a courtroom while the defense attorney told the judge that, although the accident was “regrettable” this was, after all, his client’s first drunk-driving offense.

“I was so angry!” she said. “It overwhelmed me.” (Anger, she has since discovered, is a normal reaction for the families of victims.) “I knew there was no way I could bring my son back. But I felt I had to do something--initiate some action--to make sure Dean hadn’t died fruitlessly.”

Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD, began the organization in Sacramento in May, 1980, a week after her 13-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed by a drunk driver. (Lightner was so angry, she has said, that she wanted to kill him.) MADD was, in those days, a one-woman crusade.

In the intervening six years it has spread to 390 chapters in all 50 states. Canada has MADD chapters. It has just reached England.

Phillips started the San Diego County chapter on Sept. 29, 1982. She found the resulting limelight frightening at first.

“I’d always been a quiet person. Shy. I’d never made a speech in public,” she said.

“People don’t realize how far she’s come,” Harold Phillips said. “As a public speaker, she started from ground zero.”

She practiced at home at first. Harold, whose background includes radio broadcasting, made videotapes of her and played the role of critic.

“Then one day I was listening to a prerecorded radio broadcast, and I realized that she now sounded much, much better than I did,” he said, smiling.

In the last four years Phillips has made thousands of speeches, often as many as four back-to-back in her 16-hour days. She has done 150 radio shows. She’s been on television more than 100 times.

“The MADD spokesperson is the voice of the victims, both the dead and the injured,” she said.

She was elected national president in October, taking over from her friend Lightner.

“So far Candy and I are the only two people who have ever had this job,” she said. “When the board of directors elected me, they told me it was a part-time position. Since then I’ve flown 100,000 miles. I’ve been home exactly 20 days.”

Norma and Harold Phillips’ marriage, 19 years ago, was a second one for both of them. Dean was 10 then. Skip and Allen Phillips, Harold’s two sons, were 14 and 12.

To say that they became a close family seems inadequate. Certainly they became an unusual one. All five of them worked and played together, building up four successful corporations, including Questar Pools, a tool-making company and some real estate interests.

When they sat down to Thanksgiving dinner in 1981, life, Phillips said, was wonderful.

Almost a Premonition

“But . . . it’s strange . . . I had a feeling. Almost a premonition. As Dean and Leticia were leaving to join friends who were driving out to the desert, I said, ‘It’s late. Why don’t you wait until morning?’ ”

Dean, she said, looked slightly embarrassed. “I think he didn’t want me fussing over him in front of Leticia.”

“Aw, Mom, come on!” he told her. “I’ll call you as soon as we get there.”

Two hours later, they were both dead.

“We heard the news at 1:15 a.m., and the world went dark for us,” Phillips said. “I resented the sun coming up.”

Because it is so hard for families to keep going after such a tragedy--”Many parents want to die themselves,” Phillips said--MADD maintains a 24-hour hot line. The group leaves pamphlets, with the hot line number, in hospitals. Phillips still takes her turn at manning the San Diego County number.

“Sometimes, around midnight, I’ll get a call from someone, and they’ll be hurting too much to be able to talk,” she said. “I’ve had people just cry for half an hour. I never hang up, because I remember . . . “

All MADD chapters have victim support groups, based on the fact that the expression of grief is part of the healing process. MADD volunteers also go to court with the victim’s family, if needed, to help them through the complicated adjudication process.

“Most people have never been in a court,” Phillips said. “They’re confused. Unsure of their rights. I’ve seen cases where the defense attorney managed to have the victim’s family kept out of the courtroom, because juries are likely to be swayed with sympathy for them.”

The drunk-driver laws differ in each state. In California, stricter laws have been in effect since Jan. 1, 1982. Even for a first offense, a judge can suspend a driver’s license. For repeat offenders, jail for at least 48 hours is mandatory.

“But the newer laws are not always enforced. So MADD monitors court cases,” Phillips said. “I’m sure a lot of judges must think, ‘Oh my God, it’s those MADD people again.’ ”

Who joins MADD?

“Anyone who cares,” she said. “You don’t have to be a mother. You don’t have to have lost somebody. We welcome any help we can get.”

The people MADD hears about often have stories filled with odd strokes of irony, as well as tragedy.

In 1985, an Escondido family lost two children because two different drivers drank enough to be impaired. The sentences handed out by two different judges illustrate the wide range of what is considered punishment for something that Lightner calls “the only socially acceptable form of murder.”

For 14-year-old Tawyna Blacktooth’s death, Judge Susan Knauf sentenced Frank Vanbuskirk to three years’ probation, three days’ work furlough, one year of school and a $675 fine.

That was in November, 1985.

Two months later, for the death of Tawyna’s 17-year-old brother, Abe, Judge Richard Huffman sentenced Brian Kenneth Chlopek to 361 days in jail, a $2,000 fine, 500 hours of community service, and to abstain from alcohol for the three years of the probation period after his release.

And the drunk driver who caused the Phillips and Crosthwaite families such pain?

“In November, 1982, he was sentenced to two years in a state prison,” Phillips said.

Eight months later she was working in her office when the phone rang. She picked it up and heard the mystery voice say: “He’s been released.”

“It felt like Dean had been killed all over again,” she said, staring out of the huge windows in her office. “I don’t think you ever really get over it.”

“Things are changing. Maybe too slowly, but they are changing. In the last four years drunk-driving deaths have dropped by 13%,” Phillips said.

“Sometimes, when I’m walking along a crowded street, I look into the faces of people passing and I think, ‘Well, who knows, maybe 13 of you are here, alive and well, because of MADD.’

“It’s a wonderful thought.”

On Sunday: The story of another MADD mother.