Pennsylvania Woman Jailed As a Result of a Deadly DUI

By Morgan Brickley

A recent Pennsylvania court case further proves that driving under the influence can have a profound impact on an individual’s life.

We all know that celebrity DUI arrests make headlines, but too often it is the ordinary citizen whose life takes a wrong turn as a result of an error in judgment. Not to mention, of course, the innocent bystanders who may fall victim to an incident involving a drunk driver.

Daryl Reinhardt, a mother and active community member from Hamilton Township, Pa., recently pleaded guilty to driving her car under the influence of alcohol when she hit a man walking on the side of the road, according to the Pocono Record.

Her blood alcohol level registered at 0.129 percent. The legal limit is 0.08 percent. Reinhardt pleaded guilty to one count each of homicide by vehicle, a class three felony, and first-offense driving under the influence of alcohol, an unrated misdemeanor.

She was sentenced to 11-23 months in county jail, according to WNEP local news.

Reinhardt was driving her Jeep Liberty SUV when she swerved onto the shoulder of the road and struck the victim, Darrin Brown, who was walking home from work.

Motorists who passed the scene of the accident stopped to assist Brown, but despite their efforts, he was later pronounced dead at the Pocono Medical Center. Reinhardt’s 14-year-old child was in the car at the time of the accident.

Reinhardt was not robbing a bank or running from the police. Nothing about the story was remarkable, except one poor decision that perhaps at the time didn’t seem like a big deal.

That one decision will now cost her two years of her life spent behind bars, and the immeasurable pain caused to the victim’s family and to her own.

Teresa Hicks spoke out on behalf of Reinhardt, her friend: “Daryl Reinhardt is a soccer mom, a great neighbor, a wonderful person. She supported me through breast cancer and her own breast cancer fight, my mother passing with cancer and her mother passing with cancer.”

Reinhardt wrote a letter to Darrin Brown’s estranged wife Wendy, but Brown was not sure she was ready to forgive. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have to know she felt bad about it.”

It’s impossible to tell if that forgiveness will come, or if the damage done on that night can be somehow reconciled. In the meantime, at the scene of the accident, several balloons were tied to a street sign to mark the place where so many lives were changed in just an instant.