BEAVERTON, Ore. (KOIN) — It was around 8:30 a.m. on June 23, 2013 when Michael Babcock drove his grey Ford Escape off a Beaverton road and slammed into a concrete retaining wall, not far from a child’s play structure.
Babcock was drunk.
“I had driven across the sidewalk, took out some trees, ended up riding alongside a retaining wall and taking out a fence,” he told KOIN 6 News on Thursday. “A part of the fence went through the windshield and impaled me and it went into my brain.”
He suffered broken bones, a collapsed lung, a punctured spleen, a lacerated liver, a broken neck and a traumatic brain injury. He wasn’t expected to make it through the night, and when he did doctors said he would be a vegetable.
But he survived.
Six months later, he drove drunk again and crashed his motorcycle, one of hundreds of times he said he got behind the wheel while he was drunk.
Now, 2 years later, Babcock is a graduate of a Beaverton program that targets chronic drunk drivers.
The program, B-SOBR, is geared toward people with alcoholism and those with multiple DUIs who are given the choice between jail and the alternative program that addresses the root cause.
B-SOBR — Beaverton Sobriety Opportunity for Beginning Recovery — has helped many people like Babcock find a better path.
“Through the course of the program and being sober you start thinking about things that are important, like somebody else getting hurt,” Babcock said.
The program made him think about things he never had before. “I’m 53-years-old and I’m thinking about other people more than myself.”
The Beaverton program
Jennifer Rivas, the B-SOBR case manager, said they take the people who are most at risk of being a repeat drunk driver.
“Someone in our community that may have had a DUI…they get another one or they get a third,” Rivas told KOIN 6 News. “We get them into our program quickly because they’re the most dangerous.”
Typically the more DUIs a driver has the more reckless they are and the more likely they are to be in a crash, she said. They are “the people that really pose the most risk to the community.”
“We truly believe we are dealing with a substance abuse issue, not a criminal,” Rivas said. “They got here because they can’t stop drinking, and when they drink they drive.”
Beaverton has the only municipal court-level DUI court in the state of Oregon.
Two grants totaling $613,500 — one from the State of Oregon’s Criminal Justice Commission and the other from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — will help B-SOBR continue its work.
The program also helps monitor their sobriety and treatment. They check on structured housing, help finding a job, dealing with mental health issues.
So far, the program has had 46 graduates, including 13 on Thursday.
“It’s life or death,” Rivas said. “We’re dealing with the possibility that one intoxicated driver can wipe out not just themselves but possibly others, other innocent people.”
‘It can help just about anybody’
Michael Babcock is a proponent of the program — and now after 2 years, a graduate. He wants others to know “that there is help and to not be embarrassed being an alcoholic.”
He’s learned how to deal with the triggers and cravings he’s always had with alcohol.
The 2013 crash caused him to lose a portion of his brain. He had to learn how to eat, use a fork and walk.
But with everything “that I did to me physically and mentally, I still consider myself a very lucky person because I didn’t cause anybody (else) any pain.”
He’s grateful for the B-SOBR program.
“If it can help me,” he said, “it can help just about anybody.”
Filed under: Beaverton, Civic Affairs, Editor's Pick, Top Video, Washington County
