They've got to place him in the car driving the car when it struck the victims and that is harder to prove with no witnesses to identify him. To prosecute this person for any kind of crime associated with horrible death of these two/three people, they will have to proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was driving the car.

It will take time to recreate the suspects activities on the night in question and develop some witnesses who can place him in the car, driving the car at various points along the way before/after the accident.

Is there any question that it's his car?

I've sat on one before and if the police don't bring an airtight case what they will hear is "I think he did it, I'll give you an indictment, but you haven't got a snowballs chance in hell because when you get right down to it, you got nothing." And if that's what they've got, that's what they'll get.

If however, they come up with that one minuscule piece of evidence, a receipt, a piece of videotape, a matching barcode, a witness that is hesitant about coming forward, the hair of a dog or squirrel that puts him at the scene, then it's a different story altogether.

Give the police a reasonable amount of time to do their job, and then if they don't do it, I'll be fighting with you.

According to the news stories (and I have absolutely no inside info on this), there is a description of the driver and the vehicle, and pieces of the vehicle from the scene. If he fits this description and his car is damaged and the damage matches the physical evidence collected at the scene (paint, headlight glass etc), isn't that enough to charge him?

And why not say who owns this vehicle? Why the secrecy? My sister let a guy drive her car and he had a drunken episode and wrecked it and she got some serious legal difficulty.

Say someone else was at the wheel? There's this case from Nashville:

(link...)

I just don't get the secrecy

Charging is one thing, putting togather a convincing case and convicting and putting capital offenders away for the rest of their lives is a different story. There are plenty of descriptions of the car, but we're not trying to put the car in jail, we are trying to put the driver in jail. The New Sentinel had a pretty accurate article on the status of the case (as hard to believe as that is) and they were very careful not to place the suspect at the accident scene and they didn't defame anybody in the process.

We are fortunate to have investigators within KPD and the KCSD who are experienced and would rather put people away rather than just make the headlines with the arrest and throw a case togather than results in a piss poor plea agreement or gets manhandled by a judge who takes the case down about 4 or 5 notches where there is nothing to do but plead the case.

News reports indicated that the primary suspect had lawyered up right after the incident, perhaps even before the police identified him/her. If so, that person has likely admitted nothing, delayed any tests that might've proven inebriation at the time of the accident, and so forth. If a conviction is desired in this case, the police and prosecutors will need to be every bit as careful and deliberate as the suspect's defense counsel. As others have said here, better to get it right than just get it quick.

I see the point y'all are making, and maybe I'm being too impatient. It's very frustrating to watch, though. Sometimes I think that the UI portion is way over emphasized at the expense of commonsense (and I say this as a two-time victim of drunken drivers who hit me head-on both times). I think there should be more attention paid to the D part of the equation.

If Tennessee law somehow gives a hit and run driver and advantage because his BAC couldn't be tested, that's a gigantic loophole that needs to be fixed. Hit and run should be an enhancement at least equal to driving under the influence, and running home and lawyering up shouldn't be a mitigating factor.

My second head-on collision happened on Magnolia Avenue at 7 a.m. on Good Friday, 1981. I was headed west (taking my kids to the Greyhound bus station so they could spend the weekend with their grandparents in Nashville) and had stopped for a red light at the Cherry Street intersection. I saw a car coming over the hill, away from town, with a couple of cruisers behind him, blue lights flashing. The light changed, I came through the intersection. He decided to make a left turn onto Cherry Street, but started turning way too soon and hit me, head-on at a high rate of speed. The impact bounced his car up in the air and landed it on top of a car that had been in front of him. My kids and I were trapped in the wreckage.

*I want to mention here that the driver's side was particularly mangled, and I was unable to move at all because both my legs were broken. They got the kids out, but I was trapped and gas was leaking. A KPD officer named Reagan Smith (I presume he was one of the officers following my assailant), somehow climbed inside that twisted, smoking heap and wrenched the driver's seat, with me in it, out. I owe him my life.

I spent a good deal of time in the hospital (I'm permanently disabled from this and the prior collision), and when I got out, I found out that he had only received a citation in city court -- $50 fine. I hobbled down to KPD on my crutches and found out that there'd been a mix-up with his blood sample that delayed any further legal action. I kept coming back (this was before MADD and SADD, and DUI wasn't considered all that bad in those days....).

So I'm wondering why this guy has only been charged with reckless driving and is back on the road like nothing happened. It seemed crazy to me that not being able to determine the % of alcohol in his bloodstream was the primary, and almost the only, consideration. Hell, the guy assaulted me and my children with an automobile. Drunk or sober, it made no difference. In fact, if he was sober, it means that he was massively indifferent to the harm he caused to my family.

Anyhow, back to the present situation, this is obviously a sore point with me. But I really do fail to see why the fact that this waste of human skin's first impulse was to run off and leave 2, maybe 3 people bleeding and dying in the road should give him any defense at all. Neither should the fact that his second impulse wasn't to demonstrate any remorse and turn himself in, but to hire a lawyer.

Finally, this is probably a question more properly directed to the attorney general's office, rather than KPD investigators. I'm sure my frustration is nothing compared to theirs.

I think after there has actually been an accident, the law in many ways functions just as you're saying - if a driver's failure to properly operate a vehicle results in damage, injury or death, that driver will be held responsible, whether or not the driver's failure resulted from alcohol consumption, drowsiness, cell phone use, or some other distraction inside their vehicle. Those factors may subsequently be used to determine the degree of negligence, but the incident itself is generally proof of the existence of some form of negligence in the first place.

Your recommendation fails, however, to deal with the possibility of preventing damage, injury or death in the first place. Consider an evening shift of a state trooper. On that shift, he comes across two separate drivers whom he observes swerving out of their lane of travel. In the first instance, the driver is clearly quite intoxicated. In the second, the driver is a mother with two argumentative kids in the back seat. With your preference as law, both drivers should be treated equally. Perhaps both might be pulled over and given a warning to be more careful and sent on their way. Or perhaps your preference is that both, having already demonstrated that they lost proper control of their vehicle, should be loaded into the back of the cruiser and taken to jail.

Of course, the more reasonable and responsible actions should be a stern warning to the mom and her kids, and the immediate removal of the intoxicated driver from the road. The chastened children will likely remain very quiet for the rest of the ride, and their mom will be more attentive to the road. Taking her to jail would serve no additional benefit.

No amount of warning, however, will help the drunk guy sober up enough to be better able to operate his vehicle. If sent on his way, his level of inebriation has already been demonstrated as sufficient to cause damage, injury or death to himself or others. Certainly a century's history of roadway carnage resulting from the actions of intoxicated drivers is sufficient to prove that the intoxication itself is a significant causative factor of the carnage itself.

On the contrary, kids lectured by a stern looking trooper that they need to behave and let their mother drive are likely to remember that for a long time. More importantly, Mom's going to remember it well, too.

If there are two fatal accidents, then the die is cast, and what's done is done. Negligent drivers will be held to account for their negligence.

There is a difference, however, in probabilities of undesirable outcomes between the momentarily distracted or careless driver and the driver who has three or four pints before climbing behind the wheel. The guy who fiddles with his CD player or the mom who turns to yell at the kids are generally distracted for a small fraction of the time they are driving, and they are capable of quickly returning their attention to the responsibility of operating a vehicle. Their probability of causing an accident spikes while they are distracted, but then quickly returns to normal. The drunk guy is a hazard the entire time he's behind the wheel.

The circumstances are not one and the same. The intoxicated driver has such a vastly higher probability of creating mayhem that it warrants special consideration within the law.