Mothers Against Drunk Driving to host ‘Saturation Saturday’

SPARTANBURG COUNTY, S.C. (WSPA) – Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is hoping Saturation Saturday will put more eyes on South Carolina roads before Labor Day weekend.

The Stokes family knows the pain of losing a loved one to a drunk driving wreck all too well.

“I mean, I’m just angry. I still am. Not all of that has gone away, but I think it’s just because it didn’t have to happen,” said Mallory Stokes.

Deaths that don’t have to happen is what pushes MADD to partner with law enforcement agencies all over South Carolina for the event.

Saturation Saturday is a night of increased law enforcement patrols and sobriety checkpoints that is designed to reduce the number of drunk drivers on the road. By law enforcement ramping up their efforts, they hope drivers make better choices.

“When you put a lot of the blue lights out there and if you can create that perception of this is a town, this is an area where they’re going to find you if your DUI, just think how many bad decisions you prevented and therefore how many crashes and lives and injuries have been saved,” explained Steven Burritt, executive director of MADD S.C.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sobriety checkpoints reduce drunk driving deaths by 20%.

“Let’s say we don’t stop an impaired driver, and they’re left to continue to drive down the road. They account for about 50% of the fatal collisions that take place on our roadways here in South Carolina,” said Master Trooper Mitchell Ridgeway, with the South Carolina Highway Patrol.

Ridgeway said most of the time the people they catch are repeat offenders.

“If this is something that someone does on a regular basis, you need to learn from your mistake before you cost somebody their life or cost you your life, because it’s not worth it,” said Ridgeway.

Ridgeway hopes that by alerting people beforehand, better choices will be made.

“We don’t want anybody to have to be arrested for DUI, that’s why we put the message out. You know we want folks to know that we’re going to be out in twenty different locations,” said Ridgeway.

“It is extremely selfish of people to continue to drink and drive or drive while impaired,” said Hally Stokes. Hally Stokes lost her daughter, Mia, because of a drunk driver.

She said they too were naïve in believing it would never happen to them.

“Everybody else goes back to their lives and we have an empty space in our house, and we have an empty spot at our Christmas tree, every Christmas morning, and we have an empty chair at our table,” Hally Stokes said. “We purposefully do not sit in the same spot at our table because we do not want Mia’s chair open all the time.”

Leading into this high-risk holiday weekend, they hope this message will help everyone make better choices.

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