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Published on Monday, April 19, 2004
in the St. Petersburg Times
Go ahead. Drain your glass and start your car. Trooper Ronald Evans is out there on Pasco's roads waiting for you. And he arrested more drunken drivers last year than any trooper in Florida, a feat reflecting his passion for making the state's roads safer.
Often, it's not speed that catches the attention of Trooper Ronald Evans. Sometimes, it's the absence of it. Like on a recent Friday night when Evans noticed a Corvette stopped on State Road 54.
At a green light.
Most drunken drivers, Evans said, like the man in the Corvette, are not hard to spot.
Evans should know. He arrested 300 drunken drivers last year, more than any other trooper in Florida.
"It really doesn't take much talent," said the 36-year-old. "You've just got to be out here watching."
He watches from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. nearly every weekend night. Evans cruises Pasco's roads, mostly U.S. 19, creeping up behind packs of cars as they move from light to light. Sometimes he sits in the median, waiting for violators to come to him.
He keeps an eye out for signs of intoxication: drivers who weave, follow too closely, drive with their headlights off, or make right turns from the left lane.
"It's like fishing," he said. And like any angler, Evans has his favorite spots.
He often casts his gaze along stretches of U.S. 19 packed with bars and lounges. When they close, their patrons come streaming out onto the highway.
"That's when it gets crazy," Evans said. "That's when they start crashing, and you've got to catch them before they hurt someone."
He says he has heard just about all of the excuses.
"I only live right down the street."
"I've only had two beers."
"I'm not a bank robber; aren't there more important things you should be doing?"
But few things are more important, Evans says, than getting drunken drivers off the road.
"I just think that my heart believes in what I'm doing," he said.
Evans is married and has three boys: 14, 11 and 8. He has been a trooper since 2001 and started in law enforcement 10 years before that.
In an e-mail about his job, he wrote that he's motivated by the sights of those killed and maimed by drunken drivers: " ... the aftermath of an impaired driver who runs a red light and crashes into a minivan with a family inside, or ... who crashes into someone's living room while the family is asleep ... the tragedy of the family loss, the victims' pleas for justice ... "
During 2002, 33 people were killed and 383 were injured in alcohol-related crashes in Pasco County, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety.
In all of Florida that year, alcohol-related crashes killed 1,007 people and injured 16,864.
Seeing the results of these crashes, Evans said, "sticks in your head for a while."
It takes a special type of person to do the work Evans does, said Florida Highway Patrol spokesman Trooper Larry Coggins.
"These guys work when the rest of us are asleep," Coggins said. "It's many countless hours away from the wife and kids in the evenings and the middle of the night."
The FHP has honored Evans with its "Hurd-Smith" award for 2003, given to the trooper who arrests the most drunken drivers each year. The award is named for two troopers who were killed by drunken drivers years ago in separate crashes.
"He's a credit to his profession," Coggins said of Evans. "He's just very, very vigorous in removing drunk and impaired drivers from Florida's highways."