MADD: MOTHERS SAY GROUP TO FIGHT DRUNK DRIVING

The need for a Mothers Against Drunk Driving Community Action Team in Cape Girardeau County is painfully evident to Loretta Wilson of Oak Ridge.

Her daughter, Cathy Wilson, was killed by a drunk driver.

"I think it's needed quite a bit," she said Tuesday of the team, which will hold an organizational meeting Thursday night to recruit members to work toward eliminating drunk driving. "Until you're involved in a situation like we were you take it for granted that there's something out there, I guess."

The team, first announced last month, will meet at 7 p.m. in the Harrison Room of the Community Counseling Center in Cape Girardeau. The center is at 402 South Silver Springs Road.

The team is being established to convince the public that drunk driving is dangerous and unacceptable. MADD's goals are to offer a support system and services to the victims of drunken or drugged drivers and to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from drunk driving wrecks.

Cathy Wilson, 21, was killed the morning of Nov. 5, 1988, when her car was struck head-on by a pickup truck driven by a drunken driver. The accident took place on Route D, 5 miles north of Highway 61.

The driver of the pickup truck, Johnny Wayne Newell of rural Jackson, was sentenced in September 1989 to four years in prison. At that time Newell was 22 years of age.

When the wreck occurred, Wilson was on her way to Stage One The Hair School in Cape Girardeau, where she was a student.

"She lacked three weeks graduating," Wilson said. "She had her a job then." She said her daughter was supposed to have gone to work for Trendsetters in Jackson.

Every day, she said, her daughter's death is on her mind. There are days when it doesn't bother her as bad as other days, she said, but it's always on her mind.

"She was still here at home with us, so I've got her room and everything still there. I don't need the room, so we left it like it was, pretty well," she said.

Wilson said she believed having a MADD Community Action Team prior to her daughter's death would have helped. She said her daughter had helped start a Students Against Driving Drunk organization at Oak Ridge High School, from which she graduated in 1985.

After the wreck, she said, the only person who was around to help allay the feelings over her daughter's death was Bettie Knoll, the Cape Girardeau Police Department's victim advocate. If it hadn't been for Knoll, she said, she may have been unable to face the situations she does.

"In other words," she said, "I cried on her shoulder."

Team member and Cape Girardeau Community Traffic Safety Program Coordinator Sharee Galnore said the team's membership will be a mixture of volunteers, advocates, and victims both people injured in accidents themselves and family members of victims. During Thursday's meeting, information will be shared about the MADD organization and how victims and advocates can become involved.

Galnore said the team currently has several advocates. Advocates are people who have an interest in the issue, she said, and are willing to work with the community to promote that issue.

Galnore said the team is looking for a good turnout Thursday. But if that doesn't happen, she said, the team won't disband. The team may very well have low participants to begin with, but as time goes on and more activities are implemented, she said, the team will probably pick up more volunteers.