Christine Jones is on a campaign to halt drunken driving after her son’s death.
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Christine Jones brought pictures of the crash scene, even the ones showing her son’s covered body lying in the wreckage.
Meeting with a group of police officers from several departments before they were to conduct a drunken driving checkpoint in Rochester at the beginning of this month, Jones said they were her heroes. She said their job of keeping drunken drivers off the roads was an important one, and to drive home her point, she asked them to look at her pictures.
That was her son, she said, killed by a drunken driver on a Kosciusko County road in 2007.
“I wanted them to know, ‘Here’s what it does!’ ” said Jones, who lives in Rochester, where her son grew up. “I don’t want to hide anything. I think it made them understand that this is a personal thing.”
For Jones, the loss of her 28-year-old son nearly two years ago sparked in her a crusade of activism.
She has given presentations about her experience and has helped her daughter maintain a Web site dedicated to her son. She and others were successful in getting anti-drunken driving signs posted in Rochester in memory of her son, and she’s helped lobby for a new drunken driving law in the state. She also plans to start a Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter soon in Fulton County.
But for her to get to this point was a long road, including a seven-month span after the night of Nov. 30, 2007, that left her in a fog that sometimes seemed too hard to cut through.
The crash
Jonathan Howard Kamp was beginning a new chapter in his life.
With the last trailer load of his belongings hitched to the back of his truck, Kamp was driving south on Kosciusko County Road 1000 West with a passenger about 11:30 p.m. He was on his way to Akron, Ohio, where he was moving.
At the same time, 45-year-old Leonard F. Williams was driving a Chevy Blazer west on County Road 700. Williams, who had three previous drunken driving-related convictions and was on probation for another offense, blew through a stop sign and collided with the driver’s side of Kamp’s truck.
Kamp was partly ejected from the vehicle, Jones said, with his passenger landing on him. Two people following Kamp checked his pulse and found it weak. Then they lifted the passenger off. After that, Kamp’s pulse was gone, Jones said. He died at the scene.
Others involved suffered serious injuries, including passengers in Williams’ car.
“Can you imagine that?” Jones said. “It was out in nowhere; I mean, this little intersection with a two-way stop. My son was going 35 mph.”
Williams fled the scene on foot and later told officers he was not the driver of the Blazer. He was ultimately arrested on a slew of charges and convicted of his fourth drunken driving offense. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, a sentence he unsuccessfully appealed in April.
The aftermath
The phone call came from a woman Jones didn’t know.
At the time, Jones, who is divorced from Kamp’s father, was living in Florida. It was midnight and the call woke her up. The woman on the line said her son had been killed in Indiana. Jones thought it was a joke.
“I really thought she was kidding,” Jones said. “It was the most awful thing I’ve ever been through in my entire life. Losing a child should never be something somebody goes through, for whatever reason.”
Jones can’t recall what she did for the next seven months. She had to be back at work within two weeks of her son’s death but can’t say how she functioned. At night she would go home, lie in her bed and turn on her computer. She began reading about how to deal with grief and began searching for others like herself.
“You need to find out if your feelings are normal and attach yourself to people going through the same thing,” she said.
Jones met with support groups she found through Compassionate Friends, a national self-help support organization, and with groups she found through MADD. These groups offered her access to other people going through the same pain she was.
She spoke with others about the depression that sneaks up on her at a moment’s notice, even to this day. Others had the same memory loss; normal, she said, for those who go through traumatic stress. Others also had trouble sleeping and had the same thoughts of suicide.
“The pain is so real. I never thought of suicide before my son died. After that, yes, you think of suicide, and yes, it is normal,” she said. “That’s just some of the effects of losing a child.”
Jones also said God helped her through the pain, and she now shares ways to keep her son’s memory alive.
Her daughter, Jada Hooker, created the Web site www.jonathanhowardkamp.com, which offers stories about Kamp, stories about the family’s struggles and pictures. Jones never liked tattoos but now has two featuring her son – one on her ankle, the other on her back. Jones and her daughter also took possession of Kamp’s prized 2001 XL Harley-Davidson Sportster, which they had customized so they can ride it – something they do often.
And after Williams’ sentencing, Jones began speaking at victim-impact panels for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. These panels allow victims and families of victims of drunken driving to speak to first-time offenders in person.
At one point in the past year, she went to Indianapolis to help lobby for a law that would have introduced ignition interlocks designed to keep people whose blood-alcohol level is too high from starting their cars. The bill ultimately failed.
Powerful visit
Police see the effect drunken driving has on the victims all the time, said Sgt. Tony Slocum of the Indiana State Police Post in Peru.
Officers go to people’s homes to give them death notices, they’re at the crash scenes and they do the investigations.
But to see the pain in a woman nearly two years removed from losing her son to a drunken driver – like what state police troopers and Fulton County sheriff’s officers saw in Jones during her visit – was powerful.
“It’s always a big deal,” Slocum said. “It just emphasizes that this is important.”
Police made contact with 134 drivers during their checkpoints the night Jones spoke to them, arresting one man on charges of operating while intoxicated and being a minor having consumed alcohol, Slocum said. He said Jones’ visit was also good to see because the police receive flak from bar owners in Rochester.
“They think we cut down on their business,” he said.
For people who complain about police looking for drunken drivers or doing patrols on weekend nights, Jones said she would tell those people of her devastating loss, of everything that accompanies a death that nobody thinks about – handling the funeral, handling the estate – and feels they might think differently.
“If the police receive flak, I’ll talk to any one of those people,” she said.
