Getting serious with drunks.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

IN LAST Thursday's column about David Jordan, whose teen-age daughter, Dawn, died 20 years ago when hit by a drunken driver, I purposely avoided saying much about the man who killed her.

This was a story about a father and his daughter; to weave in Eugene G. Russell somehow seemed an intrusion. But, now, let me tell you the other side of the story.

Let me tell you how on Aug. 22, 1982, as the 40-year-old Russell headed east on Highway 58 near Oakridge, he had been convicted for alcohol-related traffic violations in 1980, 1977, 1976, 1975, 1974, 1973, 1970, 1968, 1966, 1964 and 1962 in Oregon, Washington, California and Alaska.

Let me tell you how his driver's license had been revoked in 1976 for 10 years as a habitual traffic offender and how in July 1980 he had been sentenced to three years in prison for violating his probation for driving while suspended and driving under the influence.

Let me tell you how he served only 72 days of that sentence.

When the truck he was illegally driving veered across the center line and hit head-on with a Volkswagen van driven by Dawn's uncle, Bill Bromley of Eugene, Russell had a beer in his hand and 12 in his belly, according to Lane County prosecutor Frank Papagni. A woman testified that shortly before the accident he had spun his car around in a campground parking lot and nearly struck her. His blood-alcohol content was at least .15 percent. (At the time, .10 percent was considered legally drunk.)

Defense attorney James Jagger argued that drinking wasn't a factor because Russell regularly consumed one to three six-packs of beer per day and was immune to the effects of alcohol. The jury didn't buy it. They found Russell guilty of second-degree manslaughter and four other charges. Judge Edwin Allen sentenced Russell to the maximum allowed by law at the time - 10 years in prison, which he knew was far more than Russell would serve.

"Nobody will listen!" railed Allen during the sentencing, frustrated at a society that he didn't think took drunken driving seriously enough. "Nobody will listen!"

RUSSELL WAS released on parole after serving three years and 10 months - and began driving again.

He got two speeding tickets within two years of being back on the road. On Christmas Eve 1990, he was arrested outside Sonny's Tavern in Springfield for driving while drunk. "I don't have to listen to a dumb f-ing cop," he told the officer, according to the report (omission mine). He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail.

In 1993, Russell picked up another speeding ticket. Four days before Christmas, in 1994, a Springfield police officer pulled him over for driving erratically - and with his car's headlights off. It was 9:30 p.m.

Asked why he was driving wildly, Russell told the officer he'd been confused by the fog. He was arrested for drunken driving, tried, found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail.

Russell hasn't been arrested since. "He didn't like being locked up anymore," said Linda Russell, his wife.

Her husband, 59, is a sick man. He recently quit his job as an auto wrecker because he suffers from pneumonia, emphysema and asthma. The two live in Cheshire. "I'll tell you one thing," said Linda Russell. "That day has never left our mind."

You'd hope not. "That day," of course, would be the day Russell killed Dawn Jordan. I asked Linda Russell if her husband - he wouldn't talk to me - still believed he was innocent. "He believes the blame was on both sides," she said, pointing out that, among other things, he'd had "only six or eight beers," not 12.

I mentally shook my head. "I've never heard a case that made me so sad and so angry at the same time," Judge Allen, now retired, told me last week. "I don't cry much, but I confess I cried over that trial."

The good news is that, in light of Allen's plea for people to "listen!" - some are. In part because Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, which began in 1980, has brought so much attention to the issue, we're finally taking driving while drunk seriously.

Measure 11, put in place in 1995, stiffened prison sentences for those committing felonies, which second-degree manslaughter now is. Were Eugene Russell to commit the same crime today, he'd be looking at about 10 years in prison - with no possibility of early release, said Kent Mortimore, chief deputy of Lane County's District Attorney's Office.

And the other good news: Eugene Russell apparently has stopped drinking.

"I'm glad to hear that," David Jordan said when I told him the news. "I just wish he'd quit long ago, before my daughter had died."

Indeed, in the carnage left by Russell's four-decade binge, there cries out a question with no easy answer: Why are those who need to hear the message most, the ones who listen least?

Bob Welch can be reached by calling 338-2354 or by e-mail at [e-mail].