‘We will never again have a normal holiday season’: advocate, Colorado law enforcement warn of Thanksgiving DUI danger

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) - While Thanksgiving is typically a time for friends, food, and fun, Southern Colorado law enforcement officials have a warning for those celebrating Thanksgiving: drive sober or face the consequences.

According to preliminary data from the Colorado Department of Transportation, between 2020 and 2023, Thanksgiving had the second-highest average of roadway fatalities in Colorado during a holiday period. Additionally, Thanksgiving ranks third-highest for impaired driving-related fatalities during holidays over this same time frame.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving national advocate Clara Shelton said she knows she knows how catastrophic the consequences of impaired driving can be.

In November 2015, her brother Sam, a freshman at CU Boulder, was riding back to campus with some friends when an impaired driver hit their car head-on.

“He was 18 years old, he had his whole life ahead of him,” Shelton said. “It was a new time, a new chapter in his life and we were all so excited for that.”

Airlifted to a hospital with severe brain damage, he never recovered, and died 10 weeks later.

“Losing my brother in this way was absolutely catastrophic for my family,” Shelton said. “We will never have again a normal holiday season, we will always be thinking about the person who is missing.”

State data shows impaired drivers have killed 181 people on Colorado roads in 2024. A breakdown shows 24 of those deaths were in El Paso County, the most in the state.

To keep people safe on the roads, CDOT kicked off its Thanksgiving holiday DUI enforcement period on Thursday, providing 75 Colorado law enforcement agencies with extra resources to get impaired drivers off the roads until December 4.

One of those agencies is the Colorado Springs Police Department who will have extra officers out on the roads, especially on the day before Thanksgiving, also known as Blackout Wednesday.

Public information officer Caitlin Ford said the impaired drivers they’ll pull over are the lucky ones.

“People we don’t wind up stopping are often killing themselves or killing other people on our roadways,” she said.

Ford said while it might be inconvenient to bother friends for a sober ride, or expensive to order a rideshare, the cost of driving under the influence is always too high.

“A large fine, potential jail time, court costs, costs for a lawyer, all of those things, and that doesn’t compare to the cost of your life or someone else’s life that’s out there on the road, that’s priceless,“ she said.