Troy and Alana Pack had spent the day at their neighborhood Halloween party in Danville, a suburb of San Francisco. Ten-year-old Troy went as a baseball player, and 7-year-old Alana was a good witch. In the afternoon, they changed out of their costumes and set out for a walk with their mother. Destination: Baskin-Robbins.
"Alana, she liked anything with chocolate," says their father, Bob Pack. "Troy, for sure, bubble gum ice cream, because he liked counting the bubble gums that he would get."
Bob Pack stayed home. His family made it only half a mile down the road before his phone rang: "I received a call from a neighbor screaming there'd been an accident. And I raced down there."
An impaired driver had veered off the road and hit Troy and Alana head-on. Pack was doing CPR on Troy when the paramedics arrived.
"I remember telling them I love them, and hang on. Just praying that they could hang on," he says
Troy and Alana were pronounced dead at the hospital. In the months after their death, Pack's wife, Carmen, found solace in her Catholic faith. Bob Pack was angry.
"I think, for me to get through, I needed action," he says, "and I needed to take action for justice for Troy and Alana, and also for doing something that I thought maybe I could change to benefit others in the future."
[For more of this story, written by April Dembosky, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...tors-against-lawyers]
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