It was almost two years ago that Tracy Leal lost her daughter to a drunk driver, but now a new Facebook page she created is raising awareness in her daughter's name.
"I put all the information exactly like it is on the police website," Leal said.
Leal spends a couple of hours a day before bedtime, at least twice a week, uploading mug shots of people arrested for DWI in Galveston County to a Facebook page.
"Some were driving with kids in the car," Leal said.
She began last August, about a year and a half after her daughter, Samantha Romero, was killed by a drunk driver in 2009. Jim Howard III was arrested for intoxication manslaughter and is now spending the rest of his life in prison.
And Leal warns she doesn't want anyone to experience what he did to her family.
"He cried and he had a lot of remorse. I don't want people to be him either," she said.
So she continues to check police websites and upload. Sixty-one mug shots are now featured on the Facebook page titled Mimi's Voice, a nickname her daughter went by. On it, average citizens, a lawyer, an officer, even people with whom she went to school.
"People, they can call me crazy," Leal said. "I'm not insane, but my daughter is dead and so is her best friend and every kid that survived that is suffering, and I just don't want it to happen to anybody else."
None of the DWI suspects on the page have ever contacted her asking for their mug shot be removed. And she says if anyone in her family is arrested for DWI they too will go on the Facebook page. By the way, she has more than 600 friends on the page.
(Copyright ©2012 KTRK-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.) Get more Local »local, erik barajas
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