DUI Manslaughter Convict Caught Driving Again
Tampa, Florida — Every day, Karen Cain lives with the pain of losing her only daughter. It’s a pain she knows will never go away.
“You never forget,” she said, clutching to her daughter’s nameplate necklace, “Her father will never walk her down the aisle. I’ll never have grandchildren from my daughter. My son will give them to me, but it’s different when it’s your daughter.”
Cain’s daughter Deanna was riding in her friend’s car in 2004 when they were hit by another vehicle along Armenia Avenue.
The friend, then 19-years old, survived. Deanna Cain never lived to see her 16th birthday.
The women was charged and convicted two years later for DUI Manslaughter and served about eight months in the Hillsborough County Jail.
“I thought long ago the sentence wasn’t tough enough, because I felt that she needed more help,” Cain told 10 Connects.
She recalled the one phone call she got from the 19 year old two days after she went to jail.
“She asked me if I could believe she was in jail for this blank,” said Cain who did not want to use the bad word the women used, “I said yes, I can believe in your in jail for that. It was like a mockery, like, ‘Can you believe I’m in jail for killing Deanna?’”
While she was hoping the women would learn her lesson after the time she did serve behind bars, Cain says she may have been proven wrong.
On Sunday, the Cains learned the women had been arrested again for DUI, this time on Sunset Beach in Treasure Island.
Witnesses say the women pulled up next to Caddy’s in a 2005 Dodge Magnum and honked her horn several times.
Caddy’s bar back, Charles Farrow says he thinks she was picking up a friend.
“She got tired of waiting, sped off in reverse into the street and she spend into the parking lot and bottomed out, her car bottomed out. It looked like she hit a few cars and that’s why everybody came out there,” said Farrow.
As he called police, Farrow says she then got out of the car and walked toward the beach after she was confronted by Caddy’s staff.
“She was cutting between houses and it looked like she was trying to jump a fence or do something to get away, so I ran after her, caught up with her in a driveway. She kind of resisted at first, but then she was cooperative and then I walked her to the cops,” he explained.
Farrow says she was clearly drunk. He didn’t learn until the next day that she had been convicted of DUI Manslaughter years earlier.
“Hopefully she will learn her lesson,” he said.
Police say not only was the car not hers, but she wasn’t supposed to be driving in the first place.
The women was arrested on charges of DUI, Leaving the Scene of a Crash with Property Damage, Driving While a License Suspended or Revoked, and Violating Probation for the DUI Manslaughter case.
The car she was driving belonged to a Georgia man. As of Monday afternoon, the women had not posted bond and was still in the Pinellas County Jail.
No one answered calls to her Tampa home.
Cain is now left wondering, did the women ever truly learn her lesson?
She’s not sure now and can’t help but wonder if more time behind bars or even stricter laws against drunk driving would have made a difference.
“I don’t know that it would have done any good. You have to feel sorry in your heart that you were responsible,” she said, “I wish people would feel the grief we felt and if they did, they wouldn’t drink and drive.”
Arrested for DUI in Tampa? Contact us anytime for a free and confidential consultation:
Hillsborough County Office
1340 Orient Road
Tampa, FL 33619
Phone: 813-362-5623
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