Excerpts from Eric Smallridge's letter

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

This is part of a letter Eric Smallridge wrote from prison at the request of Renee Napier, the mother of one of two young woman Smallridge was convicted of killing in a DUI manslaughter/vehicular homicide accident.

Click here to read the entire letter.

"Every day, I wish that I had realized the seriousness of a DUI and heeded the advice 'not to drink and drive.' I had a great life-full of opportunity and promise, with a wonderful family, lots of friends, a beautiful girlfriend, and I had just received my bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems. Anything and everything a young man could have wanted in his life, I had. Then, in a split second, it was all gone."

"One of the hardest things is thinking about . . . how horribly I have messed up not only my life, but also the lives of so many others."

"The two people I think about the most are the two that died in the crash I didn't think could ever happen. Meagan Napier and Lisa Dickson were only twenty years old. They had their whole lives ahead of them. I think about them all the time-and it hurts. Every day I ask God why I wasn't the one to die instead of them. If only I could trade places with them, so they could realize the great lives they should have had. But I can't, and they can't, and I will live with that every single day for the rest of my life."

"I think about Meagan and Lisa's families and friends a lot, too. I agonize over what I could possibly do to ease their grief and return their loved ones to them. But I cannot do that either, and it is more painful than any amount of physical torture that could be inflicted upon me."

"Writing this has not been easy for me. It is really hard to talk about my existence as Inmate P22679-the feelings of worthlessness, the fear that I will no longer be capable of contributing to society when I am finally released from prison, the feeling that I have failed myself and my family and the sorrow I feel for the loss of two beautiful human beings-Meagan and Lisa."

"If you drink, don't drive, because I am living proof that it can happen to you."