Former South County resident credits DUI with changing her life
for the better
Morgan Hill – Sometimes a traumatic event can be just the impetus needed to turn a life around for the better, as former Gilroy resident Joanne Ritchie found out when she was arrested for DUI 15 years ago in Morgan Hill.
“Before I was arrested, I didn’t think I’d make it past 30, and I’m 42 now,” Ritchie wrote in a thank-you letter to Morgan Hill Police Chief Bruce Cumming.
“I was truly on a path of self destruction and could have taken someone else with me.”
In September 1991, Ritchie was sitting in a grocery store parking lot, “in and out of a blackout,” when Morgan Hill police officer Andy Jones, who is now retired, knocked on her window with a flashlight. And just the day before, she said, she was driving drunk on Highway 101, speeding at 100 mph.
“Sometimes being arrested is not a bad thing,” Cumming said. “Sometimes putting someone in jail is the best thing you can do for them.”
Ritchie chose to see her arrest as a life-changing moment and credits Alcoholics Anonymous with helping her to stay sober for 15 years.
Jones said he was happy to hear Ritchie got back on the right track.
“It feels good to hear something like this,” he said. “It goes in character with the way I live my life and the way I worked during my time as an officer … Most of the time you’re in a situation where you’re confronting people, so no, you don’t get a lot of thanks. However, you have to realize, as an officer, that just because they’re in a bad situation at the time of the contact doesn’t mean they’re a bad person.”
Cumming said the letter from Ritchie was one of the few times in his career that he has been thanked.
“It was a very touching letter,” he said. “When I receive something like that, it just tells me that we’re doing the right thing. (The arrest) changed her whole life. It’s really touching to hear that. It’s pretty incredible. By all odds, she should have been killed, if not that night, then some other night.”
Since she became sober, Ritchie said, she has “come back to life.”
“In the last five years, I have had emergency open heart surgery, I have seen Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona,” she said. “I have gone on three mission trips to Mexico with my former church … I was able to care for my mom when she recently had double knee-replacement surgery, and I started playing the bagpipes again, which was something I had given up doing so I could drink instead.”
Ritchie said she has competed in nine Highland Games recently, raising her competition level from grade 3 to grade 2.
She also recently got engaged to Mike, who she said has been sober for 22 years. They will marry March 17.
While she now drives a truck for a living, she said she sometimes finds it hard to believe she is still able to drive.
“At the time, I was so angry; I had other plans that night,” she said of the night she was stopped. “But probably a month before that, I was down on my knees trying to pray. I couldn’t, I tried to pray the Lord’s Prayer, but I couldn’t, so I just cried.”
If she hadn’t been stopped, she said, she doesn’t think she would have had the determination to go on. But because she had to attend several AA classes because of the DUI, she found the support she needed to put her life back together. She also credits prayer and determination, and the support of her mother and sister, as well as friends in AA.
But Jones and the MHPD hold a special place in her heart.
“Thank you for saving my life,” she wrote her letter to Cumming and the department.
Marilyn Dubil covers education and law enforcement for The Times. Reach her at (408) 779-4106 ext. 202 or at md****@*************es.com.
