Navajo Family Turns Sisters' DWI Deaths Into Annual Sobriety Checkpoint Memorial

Five DWI or DUI-related arrests came out of 1,902 vehicles screened at the 16th annual "Angels vs. Drunk Drivers" sobriety checkpoint on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe Saturday night, as about 30 members of the Peshlakai family stood alongside officers at the same intersection where repeat offender James Ruiz killed sisters Del Lynn, 19, and DeShauna Peshlakai, 17, on March 5, 2010.

Two drivers were arrested on suspicion of drunken driving during the checkpoint itself. A third was taken into custody for driving with a license revoked due to a prior DUI. After the checkpoint formally closed, officers made two more DWI arrests, producing five total enforcement actions from a single night of family-led memorial policing.

Those five arrests are the argument the Peshlakais have been making for 16 years. On the night of the crash, the family was driving home to Naschitti, on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, after a basketball game when Ruiz rear-ended their vehicle on Cerrillos Road. His blood-alcohol level was 0.22, nearly three times the legal limit. Court records show Ruiz had at least five prior DWI offenses, but breakdowns in communication among courts, prosecutors and the state Motor Vehicle Department had allowed him to remain on the road across 15 years of impaired driving. He was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison on two counts of vehicular homicide and two counts of causing great bodily harm, the prosecution outcome the family had demanded. The daughters were already gone.

Darlene Peshlakai, the girls' mother now also known as Darlene Thomas, and David Peshlakai responded by building what has become the most sustained community-law enforcement memorial DWI operation in New Mexico. The Santa Fe Police Department, New Mexico State Police and the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office have partnered with the family annually ever since. Their outreach has also reached reservation roads: Darlene worked a DWI checkpoint near Chinle, in Apache County, on Christmas Eve, handing out awareness ribbons to drivers on corridors Navajo families travel daily. "If it saved even one life, I would be so grateful," she told the Navajo Times. "If sharing the effects of losing our two babies can help another family, then our suffering isn't for nothing."

That question of whether checkpoints and community campaigns measurably move the needle on impaired driving is one the Peshlakai model keeps pressing. For Apache County communities such as Chinle and St. Johns, where alcohol-related harm on Navajo Nation roads has persisted across administrations and enforcement cycles, the Santa Fe operation offers a concrete data point: five arrests in a single checkpoint night on a named stretch of road, with a named offender's 40-year sentence as the legal backstop, and a Navajo family's 16-year refusal to let the conversation go quiet as the civic engine driving both.