"Last Call" Video

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Joanne Fairchild, Trauma Nurse Coordinator: I remember walking into our ICU one Monday morning to see what patients had come in over the weekend and it was around the holidays and there were three adult males in 30s, between their 30s and 40s, that had been brought in from different crashes.

All of them had been drinking, a couple of them at taverns and they were well above the adult legal limit. The third one at a party, they had crashed their vehicles, they weren't wearing safety belts and two of these gentlemen ended up dying of their brain injuries.

The third one survived with a brain that'll never work normally again. He also broke his neck, so he's paralyzed from his shoulders down for the rest of his life. I walked into his room and there were cards, hand drawn cards, from his children saying, "daddy we love you, daddy please come home" and I know that these children are never going to have a father that's going to be able to play ball with them or go see their plays or do any of that kind of thing because of choices he made and then because somebody who was serving him didn't question, didn't say "you know, I think you've had enough" or "were you planning on driving home? Can I call you a cab instead?"

All of those things, those interventions that people could do could have kept his children from having a life that would never be the same again.

We're learning a lot more about why kids shouldn't drink until they're at least 21. It has to do with brain development, it has to do it the way our kids drink, so I'm asking you to be really careful about ID and checking everybody. The underage drinkers of today are the drunk drivers of tomorrow.

There's been a research project that shows something I could have told you 30 years ago, and that's that drunks can't count. As a server it's your job to keep track of that and it I wish it wasn't, but it's just the nature of alcohol. You don't realize how much you've had and the more people drink, and as servers you know this, the more people drink the better they think they're doing. So thank you for doing your job, making sure that our kids are not drinking when they're underage and making sure that the rest of us are safe out there on the highways because you haven't let somebody go who's had more than they should and be safe drivers.

Chris Guzman, Former Police Officer: My main focus while I was motorcycle officer was investigating traffic crashes, issuing citations for violations of various traffic laws, and also enforcing DUI and drunk driving.

On January the 6th of 2002 very unfortunately I did find a drunk driver. I was traveling southbound on Sandy and a drunk driver was traveling eastbound on Oak Street and missed the stop sign and I did not have a stop sign. As the car came through the intersection, I impacted right in front of the driver's door, flew over the car and hit what I believe was about 21 feet away on my head. The police report was stamped fatal, so they expected me to be killed.

The driver that that I actually ran into had been out drinking most of the night with her friends. She was a young 21 year old woman had been out drinking most of the night with her friends, had also visited two taverns and was served at both taverns. She was extremely intoxicated and had been smoking marijuana as well. When they finally did the blood draw on the warrant on her at the hospital was about an hour and a half later she was still a 1.7, so that was over twice the legal limit. On top of that, she had been smoking marijuana so she was very intoxicated.

My life changed severely on that day. I was in a coma for a week. After waking up from my coma, I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what had happened or anything. I didn't get to see my kids at all for five weeks because I was so physically scary-looking, that my wife didn't want my kids to get scared. She had just told the kids that dad got hurt, he broke his leg and he's in the hospital.

I was in the hospital two months I had two brain surgeries I ended up having two jaw surgeries a surgery to get a rod put in my femur and also  surgery to get some hardware taken out of my head.

It's been it's been six years now since I got hit, and to be honest with you, the first three or four years it was it was very difficult to even get my life back on track again. It was very difficult to just to go through a daily routine without getting depressed or losing my temper or doing something. I have not been able to go back to work with the Police Bureau. I never went back after I got injured, I ended up getting medically disabled.

The woman who hit me was - I don't know many people who could be a 1.7 and not be visibly impaired. It's easy to see - there's the slurred speech, there's the red bloodshot eyes, and I don't understand how she did get served, but she did and the consequences were severe.

Not only was my life very seriously impacted, I I didn't do anything wrong. I was doing my job and I got hit by a drunk driver. As far as servers, not only are you personally liable for the people that you over serve and go out and get into accidents and crashes, there there's a moral responsibility as well. Think of think of the people that are not drinking and driving that are getting impacted by the drunk person's action that you're serving.

Capt. Lisa Reinke: As an officer with the Washington State Liquor Control Board, our number one priority is Public Safety and how we ensure that is that we visit businesses and we speak with licensees and servers to ensure that they are not serving alcohol to minors and if they see a person showing signs of intoxication, they remove their drink. Also if misconduct is occurring, they take action to stop it.

We take these violations very seriously and they could result in the loss of a MAST permit, jobs, and even the liquor license. We work with licensees and servers on best practices such as knowing your in-house policies regarding alcohol sales. We would also like you to keep an incident log. Servers should know when to call the police or their liquor enforcement officer ultimately this is for your safety and the safety of your customers and your communities.

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Ted Buck, Stafford Frey Cooper attorney at law: In 2004, we received a phone call about a young man who had recently graduated from Washington State University as an engineering degree, went drinking at a tavern just outside the city of SeaTac, and and he was over-served. When he left the tavern that night a King County trooper pulled in behind him and he wasn't thinking very clearly.

He sped off down the highway and was going underneath I-5 headed for a northbound 405 when he ran into construction road crew. There was a young lady out there flagging. The front bumper of his car hit her right leg at about 95 miles an hour. He split her open like a wishbone. She had seven kids at home, single mom, and when we went to talk to the servers and the owner of that establishment I guarantee you there was a lot of concern in those faces.

Peter Mullenix, Stafford Frey Cooper attorney at law: It's going to be important for you to think about when you're making your serving decisions what a jury is going to hear in a potential trial when you're sitting there in the defendants chair for facing a big-money judgment. The the law in the state of Washington requires you not to serve anybody who's apparently intoxicated, but what does that mean? What does that mean in this case?

Well, the witnesses are going to come in, they're going to sit in the stand and they're going to say, "I saw this person, the person who was driving the car, stumbling on the way to the bathroom." Another person is going to come in and testify, "I saw this person's or I heard this person's speech slur when he was ordering his drink."

These are the sorts of things that a jury is going to listen to when they're trying to decide whether the person was apparently intoxicated or seemingly intoxicated or evidently intoxicated. The jury is going to be asked to make a decision of whether or not you were guilty. The question then for you when you take the stand is going to be, given all this information, why didn't you notice that this person was evidently intoxicated?

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Buck: You as a server who may be involved in an over service situation can also face very significant monetary penalties. Things that you would be responsible for the activities of people who get over served at your bar. Let's say for example that someone has over served and they get in their car and as is not an untypical situation, they're driving home and they hit somebody in a crosswalk. You can be responsible for that person's medical expenses, which in a bad accident can be a lot of money. You can be responsible for the person's lost wages if they're out for two or three months or longer, you can imagine that that adds up in a hurry.

There's also pain and suffering for the person who is involved in the accident. So the end of a fairly typical accident like that, you're into monetary expenses that are in the tens of thousand dollars or even more that could be your responsibility.

Mullenix: Those are the cases where the person survives. We also have to think about the cases where the person who is injured doesn't survive, and in those cases we start to think about the claims that not only that person's estate has but the claims that the family will have against you. Claims for emotional damage because they've lost a parent, how much is that worth to a jury? Claims for how much money how much money that person could have contributed to his or her family during the time of his life that was cut short. How much money would that person have earned in his entire life, less what he would have spent. That's the amount of money that you for all of these people can be liable for, and that's how you see how the claims get from the relatively minor claims to the claims in the thousands to the claims in the millions.

Buck: Make no mistake to that it's not just automobile accidents that we're talking about. If somebody has over served at your bar and leaves and it's a cold night and they pass out on a lawn somewhere and get hypothermia or die, you could be responsible for that. If somebody stumbles out of your bar and goes back to their apartment, falls asleep in bed with a cigarette in their hand and there's a fire and people are injured you could be responsible for that. It turns out that drunk people do bad things in places other than just cars.

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