• Lasting impact Lasting impact Boulder, Colorado resident Paul Berberian, his wife Renée and the couple’s daughter Marlo will never forget their Kaua‘i vacation of last July. Unfortunately, the vacation is forever in their memories for all the wrong reasons.
• Lasting impact
Lasting impact
Boulder, Colorado resident Paul Berberian, his wife Renée and the couple’s daughter Marlo will never forget their Kaua‘i vacation of last July.
Unfortunately, the vacation is forever in their memories for all the wrong reasons. The family was heading north through Anahola on the morning of July 28 in a rental car when another vehicle slammed into them causing serious injuries to the couple.
A Kapa‘a man is up on drug charges related to the incident.
The couple’s story was recently featured in a lead business page story in a major Colorado newspaper. Though the story was as upbeat as possible – and its writer used the accident to show how a businessman is adapting his life to the needs of his family, and putting his work on the back burner – an unsaid message runs through the article: Kaua‘i, and Hawai‘i in general, can be a dangerous place to go on vacation.
The story also shows that the root of this tragedy may be drug use. The charges against the man arrested following the accident might prove drugs played a part in the accident if he is convicted.
Even so, though the indicted driver may be found to be innocent, the specter of drug use on Kaua‘i has now been broadcast to hundreds of thousands of readers in a metropolitan market that sends visitors to Kaua‘i.
Could this accident have been prevented? Who knows. But if drug use is found to have been its cause the answer has to be “yes,” and shows that eradicating Kaua‘i’s “ice” problem is critical to the future of the Island’s economy, and more importantly to the future of our youth.
The Colorado article is appearing in two parts in The Garden Island, the first half today and the second half tomorrow. The Rocky Mountain News is kindly letting us reproduce the report and the paper’s photo of the Berberian family.
It is our hope that the local publication of this article leads to more and quicker action on the war on drugs being waged on Kaua‘i. Mahalo to the editors of the Rocky Mountain News for going out of their way to help us.
