By Brittany Hanson/Garden Grove Journal
The City of Stanton is MADD. Real MADD. As in Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
At Tuesday night’s city council meeting, three deputies were honored for exemplary service related to drunk driving arrests. Each deputy had arrested more than 25 people driving under the influence in 2009.
The honors were given by Mayor Ed Royce Sr. and Pablo Morales, a police officer from Cypress who works with the MADD chapter there.
“The numbers in drunk driving are staggering. The numbers are still there and there is a lot of work to do,” said Morales.
Deputies Trent Hoffman, Jeff Jensen and Peter Mach have amassed 123 arrests total. Jensen with 27 arrests, Hoffman had 31 and Mach had the highest at 65.
According to Morales, he was sure that Mach could have had even up to 100 arrests had it not been for an injury he sustained in the line of duty which resulted in his right arm being out of commission since August.
“Something that was told to me years ago was that officers are the first line of defense for the public when it comes to drunk driving in traffic,” said Morales.
Morales also said that in 2008, 14,000 people in the nation were killed by drunk drivers alone.
California represented nearly 10 percent of this number with 1,200 deaths from drunk driving. Orange County in 2009 had over 19,000 arrests for drunk driving.
MADD was started back in 1980 when Sue Lebraun-Green received a phone call looking for her co-worker Candy Lightner. Lightner’s daughter 12-year-old Cari had been hit by a drunk driver and killed.
MADD has worked to pass stronger driving under the influence legislation in the 1980’s and today help spread awareness of the dangers of drunk driving and help to victims.
