Raymond Cook may be a great guy, the kind Shakespeare referred to as a "hail fellow, well met."
Indeed, when I wrote recently about Cook, the former doctor sentenced Tuesday to at least three years in prison for killing Elena Shapiro while driving drunk, some readers called or wrote to vociferously defend him. One former patient, whose skin cancer Cook treated, said, "Dr. Cook's work was nothing less than excellent."
There's no reason to doubt her. As I noted in that column, he'd vowed to make happy a cosmetic surgery patient who was dissatisfied with his work. But he was charged in Shapiro's death and surrendered his medical license before Judith Scrivani could get satisfaction.
Whether Cook was the principled, salt-of-the-earth type friends portray him as being or just a callous hothead speeding down a city street at 85 mph while drunk, he and anyone else charged with killing someone while driving drunk should be charged with premeditated murder.
Harsh, right?
Yup, but not as harsh as having to make funeral arrangements for a daughter whose happy, promising life has been snuffed out at 20 years of age.
Think about it: What could be more premeditated than stopping by a bar or the country club, knocking back some Crown Royals and then climbing behind the wheel of a road rocket designed to ensure your own safety but leaves everybody else in peril?
Didn't you know you were drunk or that, at the very least, your reactions and judgment were impaired?
Heck, isn't that why people drink?
The surprise, then, isn't that someone was killed; the surprise is that more peopleweren't. As Elena Shapiro's aunt tearfully asked before sentencing, "If his family and friends think he's such a stand-up man, then why did he kill our Elena? Because I don't believe stand-up people kill."
Drunken ones do, though. Just ask Craig Lloyd.
As president of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers against Drunk Driving, Lloyd knows without having to look it up that North Carolina ranks sixth in the country for the number of drunken-driving arrests. Police arrest 70,000 to 80,000 people a year, Lloyd said, and 40 percent of those are repeat offenders. Like Cook.
MADD officials don't comment on specific cases, Lloyd said, but they work with legislators to curtail drunken driving by toughening laws and implementing education programs. Those programs start as early as elementary school and continue through post-convictions, when they show drunken drivers the carnage they and others like them have wrought.
"You can see in their eyes the impact it has on them," Lloyd said.
If you're interested - and with 70,000 drunken driving arrests each year, who wouldn't be? - check out MADD's "Walk Like MADD" event planned for April 9 at N.C. State University's Monteith Plaza, and learn more about how to make our roads safer. Go to www.walklike maddnc.com or call 787-6599 for more information.
