Candlelight Vigil Recalls Lives Lost to Drunk Drivers : Tragedies: Relatives and friends gather at Los Robles Regional Medical Center to share stories of their loved ones and cast light on alcohol abuse.

Carmen Tinoco was trying very hard not to cry.

She was recalling her son’s death about a year ago, and the 55-year-old Oxnard woman furiously blinked back tears as she told what happened.

“He was killed by a drunk driver,” Tinoco said, her face tightening as she remembered the accident.

Her son Anthony was at Lake Casitas with some friends when a woman driver asked for directions. Anthony climbed into the truck to ride with her to the lake. On the way, the drunken woman took a wrong turn and drove off a cliff, killing him, injuring herself and six other passengers.

“He was only 20,” Tinoco said.

Tinoco’s story was repeated over and over again, with different names and circumstances, at a candlelight vigil held Sunday evening in Thousand Oaks by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Nearly everyone had lost a husband, a sister or a friend to a drunk driving incident. Some were angry, some sad. All had had their lives changed by an alcohol-related accident.

Despite the rainy weather, about 20 people came to the vigil at Los Robles Regional Medical Center to remember loved ones who had been killed or injured in drunk driving accidents.

They brought pictures of dead relatives, newspaper obituaries and death certificates to commemorate victims. Wearing red and white carnations, they gave speeches, recited poems and lighted candles in an hour-long ceremony that had to be moved under the hospital’s entrance canopy because of the rain.

Sally Campbell, 34, of Ventura looked at the hospital doors and said: “You know, it’s funny, but Linda--another member of MADD--and I both had children die in here.”

Five years ago, Campbell lost her husband and 3-year-old daughter in a drunk driving accident. She and her other daughter, who was about a year old at the time, suffered serious injuries from the head-on collision with a drunk driver. “And you know what?” she asked. “It was his fourth offense.”

Like most of the people at the vigil, Campbell joined MADD after the accident to fulfill a need to do something. “It was very therapeutic,” she said. “It helped me make sense of the tragedy.”

Last year, 35 people were killed and 1,404 were injured on highways in Ventura County because of alcohol-related accidents, said Officer Jim Utter, California Highway Patrol spokesman. Statistics for drunk driving accidents on city streets were not available.

“I think they do a good job,” Utter said, referring to Ventura County’s chapter of MADD, which has about 200 members. “Their emphasis has been on education primarily, but in some ways, they’re also a support group.”

Tinoco said MADD helped her get through the court proceedings against the drunk driver who was responsible for her son’s death.

“They were there for us all the way through,” Tinoco said, standing next to her daughter, Diane Sinsun. “The driver only got a year of jail and five years probation. It was her first offense, so they were easy on her.”

Stephanie Dodgett, 46, of Thousand Oaks said police never arrested the drunk driver who crashed into her car, injuring her and her daughter. At the time, about two years ago, the law had not yet been lowered to the present legal limit of intoxication. The driver’s blood-alcohol level did not meet the legal definition of drunk two years ago.

“If it had happened today, he would have been arrested,” Dodgett said. “I had to have 15 surgeries and my daughter had to go into therapy . . . . It took me six months to get into a car again, and I’m driving again, but I won’t drive in a small car now.”

Dodgett said she had recently joined MADD and decided to come to the vigil Sunday when she read about it in the newspaper. “The timing is good, because it’s right before the holiday season,” she said, when drunk driving incidents historically increase. “I hope our presence here will affect some fool out there.”