Printer Friendly Version - Colleen Sheehey-Church: MADD’s National President is a Local

Colleen Sheehey-Church joined MADD in 2005, a year after her son Dustin was killed when the car he was riding in went off the road and into the Housatonic River. The driver, a friend of his, had alcohol and drugs in her system. Colleen is now MADD’s national president.

With the national president of MADD herself a shoreliner, supporters from Guilford are encouraged to register as a walker, sign on as a “virtual walker,” or to simply donate online to help make this year’s Walk Like MADD Connecticut’s most successful shoreline event to date.

MADD bills the Saturday, Oct. 10 event as “...your chance to lace up your sneakers and get involved in stopping drunk driving in our community. (By) signing up for this event and raising funds on behalf of MADD, you are making our families and community safer.”

Making her community safer was the reason Colleen Sheehey-Church first became involved with MADD, after tragedy struck in her own family.

Colleen remembers the July 2004 evening when her son Dustin, 18, who had attended a boarding school in Kent, told her he was going to spend the night up there visiting a friend.

She recalls, “He went to this person’s home. They were partying above the garage. There were only three people, and, like normal teens, around 11 o’clock they got hungry and wanted to go out and have pizza. I believe he made a mistake. He was sober and seatbelted, but he still got into a car with someone who was impaired, and that individual leaving the pizza house was going 70 mph in a 35 mph zone in a two-door car. He was seated in the back.

“We don’t know what happened except that the car went up an embankment, going too fast, went out of control, and went over a cliff and into the Housatonic River and sank. Dustin was six feet tall and very athletic. The two in the front got out, but he didn’t. I can only imagine he spent a good five minutes trying to get out knowing full well he was going to die. Why they didn’t go down to help him, only they know. I can only assume that they were too impaired to do it. One had alcohol, marijuana, and PCP in her system. We have yet to talk to her, 10 years later.”

Colleen scrambled to find some small measure of comfort in the tragedy’s horrible aftermath.

“I asked the doctor, ‘Did he hit his head? Did he break his neck?’ Anything I could think of that might mean he didn’t suffer,” she says, getting choked up. “He didn’t break his neck—he had actually drowned. And then I kind of went loopy.”

About a year after Dustin’s death, Colleen found the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), which was located in North Haven at the time (it’s now in East Haven).

“I asked to attend a group session,” she says. “I remember going there the first time. I was sitting there and there were these people going through the same thing. I’ve lost both my parents; my husband, Skip, has lost both of his parents. Some were lengthy illnesses, some were heart attacks. There’s some you can prepare yourself for, some you can’t. When it’s a child, it’s just different—the order. So I ended up going to a local session for quite a long time, volunteered for years to raise funds, went to the local state advisory board, then was asked to get into the national board in Texas, then was approached a couple years ago and asked if I would consider running for election.”

Colleen is now MADD’s national president. Her term began Jan. 1, 2015 and she will serve two years with the possibility of three.

“I don’t wear a watch. My time is not my own anymore,” she jokes. “Part of being the national president is that you’re the spokesperson. You tell your story, you go to legislation, you try to pass laws.”

One of these is the Ignition Interlock Device Program for first-time offenders, which took effect July 1. The program requires the offenders to install a device that locks their car’s ignition until they’ve blown into a breathalyzer-type device and are below a maximum blood alcohol content.

“Even if you’re a first-time offender, recidivism is pretty normal,” Colleen explains, “and what people do with a suspended license 70 to 80 percent of the time is drive anyway. So we really decided to push the ignition interlock for first-time offenders. We’re trying to get all 50 states on board.”

MADD was also at the Department of Transportation a few weeks ago to announce the upcoming Driver Alcohol Detection Safety System (DADSS) technology.

“There’s a car coming out in the future—we’re about five to eight years away—and it’s [a result of] law enforcement, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), automakers, and MADD getting together to make this car where you just breathe and the molecules go into a sensor and [detect] the ethanol versus your own carbon monoxide, or you can just press your thumb against the starter button and it reads the infrared through your skin. It will be an option just like airbags were way back when; you’ll have no idea it’s there. The car is in Sweden and just came over here and is now being viewed by NHTSA and the Department of Transportation. I can’t imagine any parent wouldn’t want this in their car, because you want to keep your kid safe, and you want to keep yourself safe.”

MADD is in its 35th year, and its Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving is going nine years strong.

“We support the law enforcement,” Colleen says. “We go to sobriety checkpoints. I’ve gone to them at about four different places in Connecticut, standing in the rain, the cold, the heat, to watch law enforcement do what they do. We hand out brochures. We don’t give anybody anything unless they ask for it. We’re not the crazy bunch of mothers that everybody thinks we were years ago. So I’ve actually gone on sobriety checkpoints and ride-alongs, and it’s pretty amazing how people as a society think it’s okay to drink and drive. Even first-time offenders say, ‘Well, I made a mistake.’ You made a mistake, but what you ended up doing is making a choice. You made a choice to get behind that wheel. You could have taken your own life, you could have taken the lives of others, you could have wrecked property.”

She adds, “What we’re asking, in the Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving, is to secure the future with technology and to really support our law officers, and in doing that we will eliminate drunk driving. We hope to see it in our lifetime.”

Colleen, a Madison resident, flies to MADD’s headquarters in Texas once a month, and she spends most of the rest of her time speaking to others. The momentum MADD has built shows no signs of slowing, especially with Colleen at the helm.

“Every four minutes we’re working with somebody who is either a victim and/or a survivor of drunk driving. We have 80 people at our headquarters and about 200 across the country. We are a volunteer-driven company with people who have a passion about saving lives.”