Drunk Driving is not a mistake, it is not an accident, it is not an error...it is a choice, plain and simple. A person knows before that first sip passes their lips that they need to make appropriate plans for a safe way home...and to do otherwise puts lives at risk. Whether or not they are a good person, have a particular job, have had a particular surgery, or even that they have a family of their own, does not excuse a bad choice or eliminate responsibility for the terrible results of those choices…Victims of DUI have families, have friends, are good people, have good jobs, had lives.
While Troy Hovey served less than 6 months in jail, we have been given life sentences, a lifetime of pain and heartache, a lifetime without our friend, son, uncle, brother, husband, and father …and Amit Tandon…his entire life was stolen.
Mr. Hovey was given the opportunity to choose to channel his supposed remorse, to choose to embrace recovery and he squandered that opportunity because he has neither remorse nor a desire to recover. Remorse can and has been contrived.
While, Amit's widow, Deepika, works every single day of the week to make ends meet and take care of her child, Troy Hovey plays on facebook. A recent entry from May and June shows Hovey inquiring as to the cost and availability of a recreational vehicle that costs almost $9000. Would a remorseful person do such a thing? Would a remorseful person violate probation or falsify logs? Would someone who has "embraced" recovery falsify logs and lie about treatment? If he had wanted to seek a different form of treatment, why not petition the court? Why lie and deceive unless he knew he was doing something wrong? Having committed these violations, I pose a potentially even more serious series of questions: What else could he be guilty of? What else may he by lying about? Whose lives may he be putting at risk?
A man has violated the law and he must be held accountable for his actions to the fullest extent allowed by law. If he is not remorseful and has not embraced recovery, he has the potential to repeat his past crimes...and in so doing, puts each and every one of us and our loved ones at risk. Perhaps Troy Hovey Needs to go to prison, not only to be held accountable for his actions and choices, but to gain perspective on what he has done and to be given the opportunity in a more secure and supervised setting, to attempt recovery.
I have sympathy for Mr. Hovey’s wife and children, but the reality is, the only person to blame for this entire mess, this tragedy, is Troy Hovey. He has punished his own family by virtue of the choices he has made, no one else.
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