A Devastating DUI

At 10 o'clock on a June morning two years ago, Brandi Thomas was chiving to the gym. Her boyfriend and his friend were following right behind in another car. She was feeling alert and energetic despite the fact that she had been up drinking until 3 in die morning.
"My boyfriend and I had been arguing, so I drank more (ban I normally would—I probably finished off a bottle and a half of wine," the now-22-year-old Thomas recalls.
While driving, Thomas leaned down to grab a water bottle from her gym bag, and in an instant, she lost control of the car and veered into a bike lane. "It all happened so fast: the car going out of control then a big thud. After that, I was able to pull over, but a cloud of dirt fogged my view of what I'd hit," she savs.
Thomas had sideswiped two bicyclists, knocking them into a ditch, "As soon as T realized I'd hit people, ! became sick and couldn't stop crying, i kept thinking, This can't be happening," she says.
Her boyfriend pulled over in front of her and went to check on the bicv-clists. One was sitting on the ground; the other was lving down, unconscious. Her boyfriend's friend called 911 while Thomas sat on the side of the road, crying and shaking.
Within minutes, EMTs tended to the bicyclists while officers asked Thomas what happened. As soon as she opened her mouth, an officer noticed there was alcohol on her breath. The cops administered a Breathalyzer test. She failed it. Her blood-alcohol level registered 0.1; the legal limit is 0.08.
"I never would've gotten in the car i( I thought I still had alcohol in my system," she says. 'When the officer handcuffed me, T was shinned."
The bicyclists, both women in their 40s, were brought totheER. One had severe head trauma, wliile the other suffered a broken back and collarbone. Thomas,
meanwhile, was taken to the local police station, where she was jailed on felony charges of suspected driving under die influence. Her parents bailed her out later that day. "Once out of jail, I wasn't thinking of myself so much as the women I'd hit," she savs. "I felt awful for my mistake, and
I prayed they wouldn't die."
For the next few months, while the district attorney prepared a case against Thomak—which could've resulted in a seven-year prison sen-tence-—she met with lawyers and resumed her community-college classes and part-time job at a tanning salon. She leaned on her boyfriend for support and began accepting what she'd done. "I sincerely wanted to apologize to the victims and check on their recovery, but my lawyer advised me not to, since it could I >e viewed as an admission of guilt," she says.
Brandi Thomas
After acouple of months of negotiating, Thomas pleaded guilty to the DUI charge. As part of the deal her attorney had worked out, she'd spend a year in County jail. Tt was a horrible prospect, but nothing compared to several vears in a harsher state prison.
During sentencing that March, Thomas faced the two women. Both were out of the hospital—one had
mostly recovered; the other still had
short-term-memory loss and was
unable to drive. "It was gut-wrenching to see them and hear how their lives were turned upside-down by my actions," she says. Thomas also had her driver's license suspended and was ordered to pay $1.4 million to the victims in the form of monthly $100 payments as restitution.
After a lonely year in jail, during which her relationship with her boy-