$1 CHECKS REMINDER OF DEATH : DRUNK DRIVER PAYING YOUNG VICTIM'S MOTHER.

Byline: Rick Bragg The New York Times

Ann Lee wakes up to her dead child's memory every morning. Pictures of Whitney, forever 4 years old, adorn almost every wall. The child's room, home to abandoned Barbies and teddy bears, is the same as the day she died almost two years ago.

On the floor is a single pink crayon, left behind by the little girl who almost, but not quite, followed her mother's instructions to clean her room. Lee sees it every day but cannot bring herself to pick it up.

``When I wake up, that is the first thing that hits me: `God, how am I going to get through another day,' '' said Lee, who lost her daughter when a drunk driver plowed into the rear of her car on Jan. 29, 1995.

It is not asking too much, she said, to require the young man who caused the death of her child to think of her, too, one afternoon a week.

Every Friday for the next 10 years, as part of his sentence, Brandon Blenden must write a $1 check and mail it to Lee and her husband, Jack Lee. Included on every one of the checks, in that space where most people write memos to themselves like ``for rent'' or ``electric bill,'' are the words ``for the death of your daughter, Whitney.''

Blenden, 17 at the time of the crash on old U.S. 49 near Gulfport, was convicted this fall of driving under the influence and causing death, the Mississippi equivalent to vehicular manslaughter. He was then sentenced to 20 years in prison by Judge John Whitfield of the Harrison County Circuit Court.

To make certain that Blenden did not forget the child whose life he took, the judge also ordered him to pay a $520 fine, in weekly increments mailed to the family of the victim. The $520 fine will take 10 years for the inmate to repay, and week by week by week he must face up to the tragedy he caused, Whitfield said.

The sentence, part of a trend of alternative sentencing by judges who have found that jail time is not a strong enough message for criminals, would never have been levied if the Lees had not agreed to it, the judge said.

Ann Lee not only agreed. She welcomed it.

She knows that some parents would not want to be reminded, week after week, of their child's death, the manner of it, or the person who caused that heartbreak. But in a house that has become a shrine to a dead child, for a 37-year-old mother who uses giant photographs of her dead daughter in a tireless war against drunk drivers, there is less pain in it than a sad satisfaction.

``It's not like I don't remember that she is gone until I see that check,'' said Lee, who has traveled the Deep South to make speeches and has successfully lobbied the Mississippi Legislature for tougher laws.

She made her daughter a promise in the 49 hours Whitney lay in a coma in the hospital. ``You will not die in vain. I will not let anybody forget you, or how you died,'' she said.

``I keep the checks in a drawer. I haven't cashed them. What do you do with a $1 check? But at least I know that he has to be reminded of her once a week. He will have to think about her, and what he did.

``But no one has won. No one wins, in this.''

She has a 3-year-old son, Jackson, and a 16-year-old stepdaughter, Lauren. The 3-year-old roams the house pretending to be Captain Hook, and shouts, ``Take that, dragon,'' as he stabs the floor with his plastic sword. There is plenty of warmth in Lee's life, still, but even wrapped in it, she feels the cold of her daughter's death.

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Photo

Photo: Ann Lee surveys her daughter's room, untouched since she died.

The New York Times