April 2001

Prosecutor Gets a Searing Close-up of Alcohol’s Toll

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Columnist

The following article was originally printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

At a Friday morning hearing on the 12th floor of the King County Courthouse, a crowd of harried defense attorneys, prosecutors and a few hangdog defendants in orange jail jumpsuits jostled at a last gathering before taking their cases to trial. Amid the controlled chaos, Deputy Prosecutor Amy Freedheim was a laser beam of focus.

When Cynthia Osceola’s attorney asked for a week’s delay in her vehicular-homicide case, Freedheim smiled but never ceded an inch. She would postpone, but only two days, not a week.

Osceola’s case sent a chill up my spine because, in November, I had peered into the remains of what had been the black Suzuki Grand Vitara Osceola folded around a tree near Green Lake in August. A woman passenger died in the back seat, which, when I peeked, still cradled a crushed can of Bud Ice.

The specifics of similar death crashes fueled by alcohol ring familiar in Freedheim’s ears. She has prosecuted many since 1991, concentrating exclusively on vehicular assault and homicide for the past two years.

Still, she’s anything but blasé. "She’s tenacious and really passionate,’’ a Seattle Police Department accident investigations officer told me just before he asked for a transfer to another division. Like Freedheim, he has a baby of his own, and had been called during the night to too many roadside horror shows. Freedheim has gone to a few of those, too. But usually she meets the victims in the photos that sit in folders on her desk. The newest ones were taken in the first hours of New Year’s Day 2001. Freedheim filed charges against the driver in that case, 28-year-old Morial D. McDowell of Gig Harbor. He was charged with two counts of vehicular homicide for the deaths of his 24-year-old pregnant wife, Susie, and three-year-old daughter, Eileen. And with one count of vehicular assault for brain injuries and broken bones suffered by his eight-year-old son, Anthony.

There were five children crammed into the compact Kia that allegedly was traveling at speeds exceeding 90 mph when it crashed on a curve trying to outrun police. Medics were reportedly badly shaken at the sight of all seven occupants scattered across a field near Interstate 405. McDowell is expected to be arraigned within two weeks. The names of such pending cases overflow the white marker board on Freedheim’s office wall, and more cases are taped nearly to the ceiling. From the first one she prosecuted in 1991 to the newest, she remembers all the names and most of the ages of the kids who died or lost their parents.

Most of the time, her brain reigns. Freedheim says she would only get in her own way if she allowed herself to get angry. She is, after all, an officer of the court. Her job isn’t only to convict people, but to do justice. And, frankly, Freedheim says prosecuting these cases can be "a lot of fun." She loves what she calls the "Newtonian physics" involved. She majored in classical archaeology and minored in chemistry before turning to law. "In archaeology, you dig through the dirt for facts," she said. "As a prosecutor, you dig through the facts for dirt."

It’s exhilarating to apply the laws of physics to an accident scene, analyzing the dynamics of a crash, the speed, the gravity and momentum. "In a crash at 30 mph, the human body experiences 200 times the gravitational force an astronaut feels on leaving the Earth’s atmosphere," Freedheim said. But not for a minute does she forget that those bodies were human beings.

On the wall opposite photos of her own year-old son, she keeps the pictures of several young, smiling faces, including that of Matthew Chumley. The golden-haired, 19-year-old died when his motorcycle was struck in Ballard in 1998 by drunken driver Roger Souther. Souther, who had several priors, including deferred prosecutions for driving intoxicated, had previously struck and killed another man while under the influence of alcohol.

Because of Souther’s record, Freedheim was able to get an extraordinarily long sentence. He is now serving 20 years in prison. But the sentencing range usually falls far, far short of such a span. Freedheim hopes that, someday, sentencing guidelines will change. But she doubts it will happen without a big change in this country’s fierce, even defiant attitude toward driving — sometimes fast and sometimes even drunk.

"The same weekend that Princess Diana died in an alcohol-related crash (in Paris), 250 American families suffered the same pain from drunken-driving deaths here," Freedheim said. "Over 16,000 people were killed here in the past year in drunken-driving accidents." Still, with no previous convictions, someone convicted of vehicular homicide, even someone driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, will get maybe 31 to 41 months, Freedheim said with a shrug.

Only when I asked, "Is that ever enough?" did her composure slip and

her face turn pink. "It’s very, very hard to tell a family that’s what it will be," she said.

© 2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Reprinted with permission.

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