They say you shouldn't speak ill of the dead.

I've no idea who "they" are—but I think speaking the truth outweighs saying anything that might cast a dead loved one in a bad light.

Especially when it could help someone else, shed light on a dire problem, or provide dialogue for a long overdue solution. That being said, I offer the following disclaimer: I loved my father, who died in 1999, after a long battle with alcoholism. His doctors didn't say the booze killed him, but I can—and do.

And in light of the most recent development in the Brian Stone case, I think it's important to state the facts. WBOY television station reported Oct. 20 that Stone was just sentenced to another one to three years for third offense DUI. But Stone is already serving 41-56 years for his part in the deadly July 8, 2007 accident in Morgantown, W.Va.

For anyone unfamiliar with Stone, he’s the man police found to be very drunk after the horrible crash near Pierpont Exit on Interstate 68. The Pennsylvania resident had six—that's SIX, one more than the number of people who died—previous DUI charges in two states: West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Earlier this year, WDTV television station reported March 21 that Stone was found guilty of “five counts of DUI causing death, five counts of leaving the scene of an accident with DUI causing death, seven separate charges of DUI with injury, seven counts of leaving the scene of an accident with DUI causing injury, and of one count of DUI third or subsequent offense.”

For months, police, politicians and outraged citizens pointed fingers and asked how something "like this" could happen, and today the debate continues over the fatal flaw that left Stone with driving privileges. On that note, I’d like to take the podium.

My father—God love him—probably had just as many, in his lifetime, if not more. Not long ago, I asked my mother about the nights he spent in jail, for I remember an outstanding one when I was 12.

That was the same year I learned how to drive, when my drunken father pulled over to the side of the D.C. Beltway, told me he was seeing double, and put me behind the wheel. He gave me my first driver’s lesson that night, in a Ford Pinto, as I tried to coordinate the pedals and the gear shift while driving on the highway and then, on a curvy, narrow road that led to our Berkeley County home.

It was a lesson I never forgot—forget about my father's pie-eyed condition and the wisdom of him driving—I nearly drove us into a big old iron bridge, as I narrowly missed a curve in the road.

 Later that same year, my father didn't come home one night. For the next several years, he literally drained the family's finances as he fought to keep his driver’s license, by hiring some high-powered Martinsburg attorney to fight his case all the way to the state supreme court.

He lost. We lost. Our family lost.

Then my father set the precedent for Brian Stones everywhere: He simply packed up and moved to Texas, where he managed to trade in his West Virginia license for one from the Lone Star state. When he died several years later, that license was still in his wallet. So was something else—a photocopy of his federally-issued pilot’s license.

It didn't take a detective to realize what had happened. My father, who said he quit flying when he was diagnosed with cancer, instead had one of his most prized possessions pulled—the Federal Aviation Administration took it when they learned about his DUIs. (For many years, my father had also been a flight instructor.)

Stone’s three-car, five-fatality accident on I-68 last year calls to mind an equally tragic and senseless one from 2003. It occurred when the drunk driver of a tractor-trailer tried to make a turn at a city intersection—but instead plowed into a vehicle that was stopped, waiting for the light to turn green. The only reason there was only one death that day is because the young mother inside had, just minutes earlier, dropped off her little boy at pre-school. She never had a chance, as her vehicle was pushed into an embankment, and flattened by the big rig.

I’ve driven through that intersection hundreds of times. It is one where, if I am stopped, waiting for the red light to turn green, I still think of that young mother. Of her motherless son. Of her widowed husband.

Just as I think of my family and my friends, who live within a minute or two of the exact spot where police found Stone that night. It is a spot I have crossed myself, many times, while going to visit them, or going shopping, or out to dine. It is the spot I crossed again, less than a week later, when I couldn't help but notice the large dark stains that remained on the highway, or the marks going through the grassy median.

It is precisely because of such utter, unnecessary loss of life that I write these words. It is because of fear and love and concern for my family and friends, that I think it's time to take a hard look at drunk drivers. Because of how I was raised, because of my father's influence on me, I don't have any tolerance for people who choose to drink and drive. That's why, sometime after I began working a police beat in 1988—thereby seeing firsthand the damage done by people who do so—I reported my father to the police.

He hadn’t come home and my mother was worried, so I decided to go looking for him. It wasn't too hard because I knew all his haunts from when he used to take me with him as a kid. Still, I couldn’t find him: until we passed each other on a city street.

I turned around and followed him, watching as he swerved back and forth, nearly hitting another car. That's when I stopped, put a quarter in the payphone, and called the local police. “My father's driving drunk and he's headed down (such and such) a street,” I said, giving them his exact location.

It wasn’t until my father died that I realized something I had been too angry to see while he was still living. My father drank because he was in pain. Whether it was growing up poor during the Great Depression, losing his father when he was just five, being raised by relatives when his mother then had a nervous breakdown shortly thereafter, or something else—he drank to escape that pain.

So let’s stop fooling ourselves. The craving for alcohol will not go away when someone goes to jail, or when he has to breathe into a device just to drive, or even when he kills someone else because he gave into that craving.

If we really want to stop the senseless deaths—yes, even those of the drunks who eventually die from their self-induced, medicated state—then we need to find a way for them to heal their pain.