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Andrew Campbell wanted the new Harry Potter book for his ninth birthday. His parents, Leigh and Anthony Darryl Campbell, were not about to say no. The family piled in the car Friday night and drove north from their home on the Eastern Shore to Maryland, where the book would go on sale at midnight. They never made it. A drunk driver slammed into the Campbells' car while they were stopped at a red light in the town of Onley, setting off a chain-reaction collision involving four cars, police said. Anthony Campbell, a Virginia state trooper and active National Guardsman, died shortly after the crash. His son died at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters in Norfolk on Monday, his ninth birthday. Leigh Campbell, who was driving, was treated and released on Saturday. Anthony and Andrew Campbell are the latest lives lost to drunk drivers in Virginia – part of an alarming increase in alcohol-related highway deaths in recent years. Last year, 375 people died in alcohol-related crashes in Virginia – a 5 percent increase from 2001 and more than any other year since 1994, according to state figures. Virginia is not alone. Alcohol-related crashes claimed 17,970 victims nationally in 2002 – 42 percent of all highway deaths and the most since 1992, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The increasing number of deaths is a reversal of a decade-long reduction in alcohol-related highway fatalities that ended around 1994, according to a study published last year by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Among the study's conclusions: Drinking and driving is common, and arrests are relatively rare. "Drunk drivers have little fear of being stopped, arrested, convicted and punished... so they continue to drink and drive," wrote AAA researchers James H. Hedlund and Anne T. McCartt. Still, alcohol-linked fatality rates are not as high as they were 20 years ago. Since the early 1980s, drunken driving has been discouraged by public awareness campaigns and tougher laws that aim to revoke driving privileges, levy hefty fines and lock up the most egregious offenders. In 39 states, including Virginia, the legal blood-alcohol concentration has been lowered to 0.08 percent. Other states with higher legal limits face loss of federal highway money for not following suit. Fatality rates in alcohol-related crashes, considered in terms of miles traveled, fell sharply from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s, when they began to level off. The actual number of deaths also dropped by several thousand per year. In 1982, 60 percent of those killed on America's roads died in alcohol-related collisions, or 26,173 people. By 1999, that number dropped to 40 percent, or 16,572. However, the number of deaths has edged up each year since, and observers say there are no simple ways to reverse that trend. Hedlund and McCartt recommend that states modernize and simplify DUI laws. They also suggest routine high-visibility DUI enforcement – an approach favored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which encourages sobriety checkpoints and saturation patrols. Some anti-DUI campaigners believe that hard-core drinkers resistant to change are to blame for the rise in fatalities, said Jim Fell, a researcher with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, a nonprofit organization in Maryland, and a member of MADD's national board of directors. "The enforcement isn't there, and they know damn well it isn't there," he said. "They've been out there several times and they haven't been caught in the net." Hedlund echoed that view. "It's not a problem of a high school kid on graduation night who got drunk for once in his life," he said. "It's folks who do this regularly."
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