If you plan to drink this weekend, Michael Sawaya, the Denver lawyer most people know from TV, wants to pay your ride home.
For the fourth year in a row, Sawaya is offering to pay for your cab home this weekend, though he may one day lose his clients if everyone took his offer.
His work at The Sawaya Law Firm, often defending people who get injured by drunken drivers, hits close to home for Sawaya, who lost a sister years ago to a drunken driver. Time and again he sees the damage drunken drivers cause, he said.
“There’s probably a dozen reasons, but I really like what it does for our community,” Sawaya said of his offer.
“No one can ever know the full achievements of what this brings, how many accidents it could have prevented,” Sawaya said. “But people call and say thank you all the time. Those are the things that make this program really worthwhile.”
Every year, Sawaya estimates, he spends about $20,000 paying for cab rides and advertising ahead of time to make sure people know there is a simple — free — way to avoid driving after drinking.
The free taxi rides are offered four times a year, for the Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween and New Year’s. Halloween is when he pays for the most rides, he said.
If you need a cab ride home this weekend, pay for it, get a receipt and send it along with a copy of your driver’s license (for age confirmation) to Holiday Free Cab Ride Home Program, The Sawaya Law Firm, 1600 Ogden St., Denver, CO 80218. Call 303-466-3529 for more information.
