A Quiet County Keeps Deadly Score: 13 Drunk-Driving Deaths : Washington: Alcohol was related to every traffic fatality in six-month period in area south of Olympia. A statistical fluke?

Jeffrey Steffler was the first to die.

He was 23, a versatile athlete and volunteer firefighter, a fearless young man who lived full-speed ahead--and drove the same way.

“Jeff thought he was invincible,” said his father, Butch Steffler. “Remember what it’s like to be young? You felt like you could drive through a brick wall and not even hurt yourself.”

On Feb. 15, Jeff Steffler was heading home in his pickup truck after a night of bowling with the boys. A quarter-mile from his driveway, he veered off the road and slammed into a dirt embankment. The truck rolled over and Steffler, thrown out the back window, died within an hour.

His friends insisted that he didn’t seem drunk when he left them, but an autopsy put his blood-alcohol concentration at 0.14%, well over the 0.10 legal limit.

Butch Steffler kept his son’s wrecked truck, planning to salvage parts. Months later, it still sits untouched amid the backyard weeds, a rusting monument shrouded by a plastic tarp. Steffler went out recently to look it over, pulling back the tarp to reveal a crumpled hood and caved-in roof.

He shook his head and said of his son: “He knew it would never happen to him.”

Had his death served as a warning, Jeff Steffler’s family might have found some consolation. But it seems no one was listening: His crash was just the start of a bloody six months in this quiet corner of the Pacific Northwest.

By the end of July, 13 people had died on Thurston County roads, and officials say every crash involved alcohol.

Bad luck? It’s closer to the norm than you might think. Alcohol was involved in nearly half the nation’s 44,500 traffic fatalities last year, making drunk driving one of America’s deadliest hazards, federal highway officials say.

“These things are not accidents,” Jennifer McConkey said. “They are the result of people choosing to be under the influence of alcohol while they drive.”

As head of a Thurston County drunk-driving task force, McConkey keeps the death count and tries to persuade her neighbors that, yes, it can happen to them.

Being staggering drunk isn’t necessary; one drinking driver who died was below the legal limit. In fact, it isn’t necessary to drink at all; four of the 13 were killed by another driver who had been drinking.

McConkey has no explanation for why this county, tucked into evergreen forest and farmland at the southern end of Puget Sound, had such a dismal half-year. Roads here are not particularly treacherous, and the county’s populace of 168,000 is no more sotted or sober than elsewhere.

But that’s her point: This could have happened anywhere. After years of public education, most Americans consider drunk driving to be bad form--but often, only in theory.

“A lot of responsible people drink and drive because they don’t consider themselves drunken drivers,” McConkey said.

“They may have a bottle of wine with friends over dinner, or a couple of drinks at a bar. They’re not intentionally putting themselves out on the highway as loose cannons, but that’s the effect of their behavior.”

And so Thurston County’s 13-for-13 record is tragic, but it is also an opportunity.

Grieving friends and families tell of smashed cars and shattered lives, making it painfully clear that drunk driving is no distant, hypothetical danger. It is as close as the drive home from work, as real as the obituary for that nice boy next door.

It’s not easy for them to share their stories. They do so, hoping to break the hush around the lethal combination of drinking and driving.

They do so, hoping that this time someone will listen.

Jack Krause, 50, was the second to die.

Daughter Patricia Krause says her father had been drinking and driving as long as she can remember. But he never got caught, never got in a wreck. He told his family he was a good driver, and they repeated it like a mantra, hoping to ward off the inevitable.

Patricia says her father was on his way home March 2 from a friend’s tree-planting party, keg provided, when his pickup truck pitched off the road and crashed into a ditch. The autopsy said Krause broke his neck. It also noted his blood-alcohol concentration was 0.29%, nearly three times the legal limit.

She loved her father, but Patricia, 26, is angry at him.

“He left three new grandchildren,” she said. “And he was a fabulous artist. There were so many pictures I wanted him to draw. This didn’t have to happen.”

After his death, his drinking buddies gathered to mourn.

“They were at the house for a week--wasted--wondering what happened,” Patricia said. “They were asking each other, ‘Did he fall asleep? Did he drop a cigarette?’

“They keep on wondering the real reason he crashed, when the real reason is in front of their faces. My father died from drinking and driving.”

Roy Roberts, 63, used to count the weeks, then the days, before his retirement as a press operator at a soda-can factory in Olympia. “I’m free!” he shouted on his last day.

A treatment program had also helped free him from alcoholism. “He’d been sober a year and three months, completely off any liquor whatsoever, and he was very proud of it,” said Helen Dahl, an old friend.

Roberts had great plans for retirement: camping trips, motorcycle adventures, endless projects around the house.

But those plans crashed with him the night of April 16 as he drove his motorcycle--stone sober--along a rural road. A pickup truck ran a stop sign on an intersecting side road and plowed into Roberts, state troopers said.

Roberts and his bike went spinning into the ditch. Fatality No. 4.

A Breathalyzer test given to the truck’s driver a few hours later showed his blood-alcohol concentration exceeded 0.10 at the time of the crash, state troopers said. He is awaiting trial on a charge of vehicular homicide.

“What a terrible waste of life,” Dahl said. “To quit drinking, and then have a drunk run over you.”

Denise Dillon, 17, was heading home from work when a car with a drunk driver at the wheel loomed out of the darkness. It crossed the center line and smashed head-on into Dillon’s car.

The driver, a 20-year-old woman, died instantly. Fatality No. 9.

Dillon survived, waking to find herself trapped at the center of a grisly scene. In the pulsing glare of ambulance lights, her car’s front end looked as if it had been bitten off, its smooth curves now jagged shreds of metal.

The collision jammed her legs back beneath the seat. “One of my feet got twisted around backwards,” she said, “and one of the bones in my leg came out through my knee. It was a mess.”

She spent two weeks in the hospital and three months in a wheelchair. With the help of physical therapy two hours a day, three days a week, she’s just starting to hobble around on crutches.

Dillon tries to be cheerful, thankful for the seat belt that saved her life, determined not to let a crash that crushed her legs destroy her spirit.

“Hopefully, in a few months, my knee will be OK, but then again it might not be,” she said. “It could go either way, still. I guess we’ll just have to hope that I heal.”

Police reports provided all she knows of the other driver. Her name was Margaret Courtney, her blood-alcohol concentration was 0.19%, and her car’s speedometer, frozen on impact, was stuck at 85 m.p.h.

The stories go on:

* No. 3 was a 23-year-old husband and father, the unlucky front-seat passenger in a car struck head-on by a drunk driver, troopers said.

* Nos. 6, 7, and 8 were migrant farm workers, passing through the county after a night of payday partying. All three had been drinking; all three died when their car flipped over and caught fire on a lonely highway.

* No. 13 was one that gnawed at even seasoned rescue workers. He was a 16-year-old boy who took his parents’ car out on a midnight joy ride, missed a curve and rolled the car, killing himself. His blood-alcohol content was 0.14%, troopers said.

That crash happened July 24. Since then, Thurston County has had four more traffic deaths, only one involving alcohol.

“Our curse has been broken,” McConkey said. She predicts that the percentage will continue creeping down toward the national average, but she finds little joy in that.

Any Friday night in Thurston County, you still can see teen-agers outside the convenience stores, waiting for someone over 21 to buy them beer. You can see their parents, too, emerging from taverns and fumbling for their keys.

“There are a lot of injustices in the world, I know,” McConkey said. “But this is so preventable. It’s as easy as making other arrangements for a ride home.”

Though she often feels as if she’s throwing sand against the tide, McConkey presses on. She organizes seminars and tacks up grim posters in schools, forever seeking new words for an old message:

Drive clean, she says. Drive fresh. If you drink, don’t drive. If you drive, don’t drink.

How many times must it be said? She wishes, but sadly knows otherwise, that 13 would be enough.