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Sunday, May 5, 2002
Life Sentences: TIMOTHY GLASS, 50, DWI accident victim
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Paradise Hills
When he tells his story at victim impact panels, Tim Glass is as harsh and unforgiving as the drunken driving crash that changed his life.
"I hope to God," Glass tells convicted drunken drivers, "that I haunt you for the rest of your life."
Glass was an athlete before a pickup truck going 60 mph slammed into the back of his smaller truck as he was stopped at a red light on San Mateo at Candelaria. The crash broke his hip, jammed two vertebrae into his head and sheared off a portion of his brain. Three years after the crash, Glass is two inches shorter, walks with a limp and is still in pain.
Glass was a computer scientist and a writer before the crash pushed his head into the roof of his pickup. He had to learn to walk, talk, read and write again. He lost his job and sold his house to pay medical bills. Today, he takes college courses in Web site design in hopes that he can go back to work and feel a little bit closer to the man he used to be.
The man who hit Glass, 51-year-old Lorenzo Mojica of Albuquerque, walked across the street to get a cup of coffee immediately after the crash, according to police. He told a judge he was drinking because he had buried his girlfriend that day. Mojica got a three-year prison sentence for the crash that injured Glass. He was also sentenced to six years for raping his deceased girlfriend's 12-year-old daughter.
The judge allowed the sentences to run simultaneously.
That means, Glass points out bitterly, that Mojica is really receiving no punishment for upending his life and the lives of his wife and daughter.
"Today, I am fighting for my life," says Glass. "It's an ongoing nightmare. There is the physical pain and the emotional pain and the constant fight to be someone again. Tim Glass is dead. He died that night on San Mateo. And he's a tough act to follow."