• 10
  • November
    2011

55-year-old Vincent Leone Jr. was only 26 when his life was changed forever in an alcohol-related car accident. A drunk driver blew a stop sign and slammed into Leone's new Corvette Stingray, rendering his car inoperable and putting him in the hospital for two years.

"I ran into a telephone pole," Leone says, as Rebecca Bennett reports for the Cypress Creek Mirror. When the drunk driver hit him, Leone's Stingray ricocheted on impact. "The telephone pole came down through the top of my car and came and rested on top of my head, giving me a closed head injury."

Now Leone works to pass on what happened to him as a way to prevent drunk driving and warn against the dangers of alcohol generally. As Bennett reports, Leone's father tracked down the drunk driver with the help of a private investigator.

But the driver was "nowhere to be found," according to Leone. "He might be dead from sclerosis of the liver for all we know." Leone says this in response to what the private investigator did find - which was an empty apartment full of empty bottles.

Leone feels that the laws prohibiting repeat DWI are too lenient; while he spent two years in the hospital and has been struggling to recover ever since the accident, the drunk driver had apparently just been released from jail for DWI when he hit Leone.

Source: Cypress Creek Mirror, "Survivor of drunken driving accident warns of alcohol's dangers," by Rebecca Bennett, 11/10/11