A driver traveling north on Route 1 on Thursday night would have encountered an unexpected sight: a photo of a smiling college-age girl.
The photo of Amanda Moore, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County, student who was killed by a drunk driver four years ago when she was 22, was placed at the front of a sobriety checkpoint set up by University Police.
As Moore’s family and friends watched, police arrested nine people for driving under the influence between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. Friday morning. Her parents, who drove eight hours from Myrtle Beach, S.C., felt every arrest was a personal victory, cheering as drivers were walked in handcuffs to the police station.
“The fact that they’ve dedicated this to Amanda is just a huge thing for us,” said Ashleigh Beck, Moore’s best friend, who met her in preschool. “It makes us feel like she didn’t die in vain. We’re getting her name out there and getting the reason why she died out there, and we’re trying our best to do something about it.”
“We did everything together. We were supposed to grow old together, have kids together,” she added. “I was supposed to be in her wedding. She was supposed to be in mine.”
All that changed when Moore, an only child, was killed by a drunk driver four days before Christmas in 2005.
Moore’s parents said the driver was driving without a license, had no insurance and that it was his fourth DUI. He served only six months in jail.
“He took her life and everything that we ever wanted for her … what every parent wants for their children: to graduate college, to have a nice, beautiful wedding, to have kids. He cheated her out of all of it,” said her mother, Carolyn Moore. “He got a six-month sentence, and she got a life sentence.”
Each of the 822 vehicles that passed through the checkpoint was stopped for 20 seconds or less. Police pulled 32 drivers they suspected were intoxicated into a nearby parking lot for a field sobriety test.
The officer who managed the checkpoint, Lt. Robert Mueck, said the goal of the checkpoint was twofold.
“One is to get drunk drivers or impaired drivers off the road,” he said. “And the other is it’s flashy, it’s big, people see it and they’re calling back to the bars and it’s altering decision making at the bars. That’s good news because it reduces the amount of drunk drivers on the road.”
Donna Beck, Ashleigh’s mother, called the checkpoint a “fabulous healing opportunity for the family.”
Donna Beck is a survivor of a drunk-driving accident herself. A drunk driver hit her car and pushed it into a tree in 1982. She was five months pregnant and on her way to her mother’s funeral. She said she was impaled by the steering wheel, lost the bottom half of her face and had to have it reconstructed.
“For [Amanda’s crash] to happen 23 years after my crash, it just seems like we’ve been victimized horribly twice,” she said.
Michelle Elden, Moore’s roommate for about a year and a half, described Moore as someone who “was always selfless and giving” and “always had a smile on her face.”
“This is wonderful,” Carolyn Moore said of the checkpoint. “Just seeing her picture almost made me go to the floor. It really is nice.”
estelle@umdbk.com
