Jamal Leblanc, aged 30, had been driving since the age of 18, but he should never have been given the keys. He was a bit of a speedster, and to make matters worse, he was also a bit of a drunk. He'd totaled a couple of nice cars and now mostly made due with old used ones. He'd always come out unscathed and never really changed his habits. He never usually thought twice about demolishing sign post, crumpling some cones, cutting other drivers off, or accidentally swerving into another lane for a second. But oh boy, if anybody ELSE made a careless move in THEIR car, it wouldn't be half a second before Jamal's middle finger would be up and profanities would be flying out the window. Jamal's road rage added a third layer of nuisance his insufferable mix of recklessness and alcoholism. It's a wonder the man wasn't already dead or in prison.
One of the first incidents that really showed how dangerous Jamal was going to be was when he was coming home drunk from a party at the age of 19. One hundred kilometers an hour through a residential zone. Music blasting, drunk girls screeching in the back seat, his best friend Dave laughing like a hyena. THUMP THUMP. Three hundred meters from Dave's parents' house, Jamal's station wagon obliterated the neighbor's prized black-and-white boxer. After the others finally convinced him to turn around and go back to see what he hit, they pulled over and the girls were in tears. He was like, "Whatever, it's just a dog, right?" His dad paid off the neighbor, the first of many times Jamal would escape any real consequences for his actions.
Jamal had run over quite a few people's pets since then; they usually never new it was him. You'd think he'd have learned his lesson when he almost hit that kindergartner and her mother while passing that school bus in Taylor City, but no, everybody was fine, and that just showed him how overrated the danger was, at least in his mind. He used to go barreling through crosswalks, honking his horn to get pedestrians out of the way. He laughed for hours when that old lady dropped her groceries when she was leaping back to the sidewalk as quick as she could. He told the story at the pub later that night, but even his buzzed friends didn't seem to think it was as funny as he did.
It was about three years ago that Jamal had the one mishap that actually made him stop to think for more than a minute that there might actually be a real problem that might actually have been his fault. He was in the outer regions of a city he'd always wanted to visit, a city near a beach his friends had always told him about, speeding back to his hotel at 3:00 in the morning, when a young Asian immigrant who was even drunker than he was stumbled and fell into the alley right in front of his car. The bumper decapitated him instantly, but Jamal didn't stop. At first he didn't stop because the substances in his system didn't let him register what happened for 30 or 40 seconds. Then he didn't stop because he just wanted to get as far away from what happened as possible, knowing that the man was dead and that he didn't want to see what he'd done. Having finally taken a human life, Jamal was too scared and too shocked to return to the scene of the crime. He didn't even go back to the hotel. He drove all the way back to his hometown almost without stopping. He was jittery for the next several days and actually drove slower than he ever had in his life for about two weeks. But the police in that faraway city never had cared that much for immigrants, and they never did trace the man's injuries back to Jamal's car, and Jamal eventually managed to put the incident mostly out of his mind.
And so it was, nearly three years later to the day, early on the morning of January 1, 1999, that Jamal Leblanc still had not truly learned his lesson. Having left death, destruction, and numerous near misses in his wake, he was passed out peacefully on a sofa after watching the New Year's celebration on his hand-me-down, 13-inch black-and-white TV. Who knows what punishment the mysterious forces of justice from beyond this earth have in store for him?