Columnist Susan Snyder: Aftermath of crash still felt

Sunday, Aug. 13, 2000 | 9:03 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@ lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

The room was cold, the benches hard and the proceedings harder still.

There could be no winners. Everyone knew that going in. Too much already had been lost.

A young woman left permanently disabled after a five-month coma. Two children and a husband learning to exchange the happy, athletic mother and wife they once knew for the struggling, frustrated woman they still love.

A young man facing almost nine years in prison instead of his honeymoon. His high-school sweetheart planning how to wait instead of her wedding day.

A courtroom filled with two families and friends of two families, all left to mourn the lives and plans destroyed the instant a legally inebriated Paul Haber slammed his car into one driven by Jocelyn Corpus.

Haber had no right to drive drunk. On that, everyone agreed.

"I've ruined everything," Haber told the judge. "I let a lot of people down -- not just my family, but Jocelyn's family. I'm very sorry for all of this."

He cried as he spoke -- real tears, not "court tears." Others cried as they listened.

Earlier a tearful Brett Massucci described how he held his wife's head as she lay bloodied in the street. He described her eight-month hospitalization and her many brushes with death. He described the lifelong recovery process and the daily battles the family faces.

"When I come home from work, I can't ask her how her day went because she can't remember," Massucci said.

Under their breaths, Haber's family said Corpus should have been wearing a seat belt. Perhaps she wouldn't have been ejected from the car. Perhaps she would have fared better.

Hissing whispers and icy stares slipped into voids words failed to fill. Two families steeped in pain glared at each other from opposite sides of a courtroom.

The room was cold with no forgiveness to warm it.

This is the legacy of a drunken driver. Not the habitual kind, but the kind any one of us could become by getting behind the wheel when we shouldn't -- just one time.

Haber drove under the influence of liquor he drank to celebrate the engagement ring he'd just bought. Kristen Root will wear it while she waits.

"He's not a criminal," she sobbed as bailiffs snapped handcuffs around Haber's wrists.

An exhausted Massucci took his children by the hand and led them quietly from the room. The proceeding was over, but his family's struggle would continue.

Hearts broken. Futures in ruins. The wreckage of a moment's poor judgment.

"It's a tragedy," John Haber said after they led away his son. "He's gone through a personal hell the last year and a half. Nobody cares about that but his family."

Haber isn't equipped to face prison life. Corpus will never walk, run or think normally again.

"He has a heart," Root said of her fiance.

"Jocelyn's recovery will be a lifetime process," Massucci said of his wife.

The room was cold. There could be no winners.

Too much already had been lost.