Lubbock woman remembers sister killed by drunk driver

LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - The Lubbock Police Department is reporting nearly 7,000 crashes in Lubbock so far in 2022, hundreds more than last year.

Lucinda Holt lost her sister back in 2003 in a crash with a drunk driver.

“A child that lost her mother. All of us, all of my siblings, we lost our sister,” Holt said. “My parents had to bury their daughter.”

Holt says her family still deals with the consequences of one person’s decision to drive under the influence nearly 20 years later.

“We have to live with that every single day,” Holt said.

That decision robbed her niece of a chance to grow up with her mother by her side.

“Since then, my niece has moved. She has a career. She got married,” Holt said. “I got married. We lost my father. So it’s all these life events that she wasn’t here to be with us.”

Lubbock officers made 517 arrests for DWI in 2021. 409 arrests have been made in the first 11 months of 2022.

Brady Cross with LPD says officers are working to keep those drivers off the road, and the community is doing its part.

“Our officers are doing a great job of finding those who are impaired out there driving,” Cross said. “But also I think the community and the citizens of Lubbock are making better choices and using the options that are available to them.”

More than 6,900 calls for service have come in for crashes across the Hub City as of November 2022.

Of those, 28 incidents have resulted in someone’s death.

Cross says strongly enforcing traffic laws will bring that number down.

“To try and lower traffic violations,” Cross said. “Obviously to decrease the number of crashes we have and ultimately trying to decrease the number of fatalities we see.”

As for Holt, she’s asking the community to look beyond the numbers.

“We are more than statistics,” Holt said. “When you see the faces and hear the stories of the people directly impacted by it, that humanizes what we’re doing and hopefully it resonates with people.”

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