Woman Texted ‘Drunk Driving Woo’ To Boyfriend Just Before Fatal Crash

A Miami woman, 22-year-old Mila Dago, was charged with manslaughter after she crashed her vehicle into another vehicle and killed her passenger and friend, Irena Reinoso, also 22, at approximately 4:45 a.m. on August 14, 2013. Dago had been text-fighting with her boyfriend all evening long as the two women attended several bars. Dago, intoxicated and angry, then got behind the wheel of her vehicle before the fatal crash.

It’s difficult to comprehend just how dangerous a situation is for someone to be driving, drunk, and texting, but it probably happens more often than realized. When intoxicated, inhibitions are lowered, so it’s plausible that if one makes a poor decision like driving drunk, they are likely to drive drunk and text too. Dago was unharmed in the accident that claimed the life of her passenger, but she T-boned a truck with 51-year-old Benjamin Bynum driving when she ran a red light. He survived the crash as well.

Prosecutors say at the time of the crash, Dago was in the middle of an argument and break up with her boyfriend. As she and her friends bar-hopped, she fired off a series of damning texts to him, the last one sent just minutes before she crashed into the truck and killed her friend. Perhaps the texts were meant to be manipulative or make her boyfriend feel sorry for his part in the argument, but investigators were able to retrieve the messages that were sent.

“Drunk Driving Woo. I’ll be dead thanks to you.”

The liver is able to metabolize approximately one beer or one ounce of liquor an hour, if functioning properly. Dago’s blood alcohol level was 0.178, approximately twice the legal limit, and approximately two hours after the fatal crash, so it is plausible that her blood alcohol level was twice that at the time of the crash. Dago was driving a rented Smart car for the evening. The car may have been the only thing smart about the happenings of that evening.

Dago has pleaded not guilty to DUI manslaughter, vehicular homicide, and two counts of DUI with damage to a person. That may be difficult to prove being that text messages and blood tests don’t lie, and her friend has now been dead for nine months. It is unknown if she reconciled with the boyfriend she was sending the texts to.

Research has proven that texting while driving is at least as dangerous as texting while drunk, so her level of impairment is hard to imagine.

[photo courtesy of worldredeye]