Posted on 04/09/2006 7:56:43 AM PDT by radar101
The years have come and gone since Tiah-Marie Foley was nearly killed by an unlicensed driver in 1998, but the one thing time hasn't diminished is her constant pain.
Her hands feel like they've been smashed with a hammer and her right arm, supported by a system of plates and screws, feels like it's being stabbed with an ice pick.
Foley, 37, said police told her the man who ran head-on into her car at a blind intersection in Glen Ellen was on his way to work at a local vineyard. Foley, who also worked in the wine industry, said the man should not have been on the road.
"If he had not been on the streets, nothing would have happened," said Foley, sitting in the living room of her Santa Rosa home.
Her arms, she said, were so severely broken doctors considered amputation. She now lives with pain that likely will get worse with age.
"I've never had a day that I didn't wake up without severe pain," she said. "It's a lifestyle you definitely have to adjust to."
In the past seven years, Foley's medical costs have topped a million dollars, with her health insurance covering about 70 percent of it.
She said she has an out-of-pocket expense of $1,400 a month for her medical insurance, co-payments and medications.
After Foley's accident, which happened two months before her wedding, she gave up her career in marketing and public relations for Allied Domecq's local operations.
She is now a stay-at-home mom, raising her children, Jack Henry, 4, and Cameron, 6, with her husband, Jack.
Police told Foley she had been hit by an unlicensed and uninsured motorist who was in the country illegally and who had been driving a vehicle that belonged to another illegal immigrant.
"He was released because he had no injuries," she said. "Between a private investigator and the police, they couldn't find him."
Foley said that if the man who ran into her had been properly trained and licensed, her accident might have been avoided. But she still doesn't believe illegal immigrants should be given driver's licenses.
"It's not fair to give them driver's licenses when they're breaking the rules being here," she said. "It seems like it's so black and white to me."
The man who hit her was on his way to work at a vineyard when the accident occurred, raising the question of whether the vineyard owner who hired him bore any responsibility for her injuries.
"I don't want winery owners punished," she said. "They didn't put him in that car and tell him to drive to the vineyard. That wasn't their responsibility."
Duff Bevill, a grape grower and past president of the Sonoma County Grape Growers Association, said he does what he can under the law to make sure his workers present valid employment documents. But he said anti-discrimination laws limit an employer's ability to "look too closely."
Foley acknowledged that the issue quickly becomes complicated.
"As black and white as the issue is, there is a gray area of who is responsible," she said.
Mushroom picking immigrants are a damned scourge on our roads. They lift a Delaware license tag of some poor shopper and use it in Pennsylvania. They pile into vehicles after dark and the few state police are seldom around to bother with them. They do bother when one of them gets in an accident and the entire gang runs like hell. They leave whatever they hit and the car. It is often an unsuspecting driver of another vehicle left with a mess.
Can't employers (voluntarily) check SS numbers to see if they match the person?
What he means is that he is doing the minimum required.
Revolving door for unlicensed drivers
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1611920/posts
Heres why i oppose any licensing of illegals
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1059806/posts?page=60#60
One killed my uncle and just walked away !
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