The Bingham family should be looking forward with excitement to Thanksgiving. Instead, Frank Bingham is experiencing unimaginable grief, and the community shares his pain. His wife and two young children are gone, killed by a suspected drunken driver who blew through downtown Denver last Friday night in a speeding pickup truck.
The grisly hit and run destroyed an innocent family out for an evening train ride and a cup of cocoa.
We are left to shake our heads in sorrow and disbelief. The tragedy leaves with all of us a powerful message: We need to enforce these profound cliches: Drinking and driving don’t mix, and friends don’t let friends drive drunk.
The fate of the suspected driver, Lawrence Trujillo of Westminster, will be sorted out by the courts. He has been charged with drunken driving and is under investigation for vehicular homicide. A friend was charged as an accomplice.
By all accounts, the Binghams did everything by the book. They ventured into the intersection with a walk sign and stayed within the crosswalk. A truck blasted through a red light, striking and killing 4-year-old Macie and her brother, 2-year-old Garrison as they sat in a side-by-side stroller. Their mother, Rebecca, was hit and killed, too. Frank Bingham was hit and injured.
Family members and friends from the Bingham’s Bonnie Brae neighborhood are mourning. Frank Bingham, an educator and former principal at Bromwell Elementary, is well known in south Denver.
The accident struck a chord far beyond the Binghams’ circle of loved ones because it underscores our vulnerability. Many of us have stood at that corner at 15th and Arapahoe. Our kids, like the Bingham children, love train rides and take joy in wearing their costumes well past Halloween.
You can get a burglar alarm, you can make sure your children don’t play on the street and you can caution them against talking to strangers, but how do you guard against such random horror?
In an eerie parallel, five members of the Gonzales family were killed Saturday in New Mexico by a drunken driver going the wrong way on Interstate 25. The family was heading home from a soccer match in which two Gonzales girls, ages 10 and 11, had participated. The driver, who later died, had a blood alcohol level of 0.32 percent, four times the legal limit.
The dangers of driving while under the influence are well-known. But the awful tragedies that befell the Gonzales and Bingham families show why the message bears repeating and enforcing: Don’t drink and drive.
Don’t even think about it.
