Chanton Jenkins
We just had a pretty heated debate going on last week about the perils of drunk driving, personal responsibility and whether or not being impaired by drugs or alcohol makes a person less responsible for an accident that causes another person to lose their life. I think the reason the argument of a certain person got so frustrating for people like myself who believe being drunk or high is a piss poor excuse for taking a life is the fact that that other person didn’t understand the collateral damage that come with something that terrible.
Perhaps this story will make the point a little clearer.
Thirty-two-year-old Chanton Jenkins has had a problem with the law in Harris County, Texas for most of his life. Jenkins is also the father of four. On Saturday evening, he and his adult brother loaded his Lincoln Town Car with his four children – Hallie Jenkins, 4, Karrinton Jenkins, 1, Devin Jenkins, also 4, and Jada Barnes, 10 – along with two of their friends, Malik Barlow, 7, and Dreyton Thompson 11, and headed out during a heavy storm in Houston. According to police, he was talking on a cell phone when he lost control of the car an plunged into a flooded ditch.
The Lincoln sank almost immediately. Chanton Jenkins, his brother, and Jada Barnes managed to escape the submerged auto, but the other five children weren’t so lucky. Devin, Malik and Dreyton were found drowned in the back seat of the Town Car (I’m sorry, I need to stop for a minute).
Um, OK…Police found little Karrinton’s body this morning. They’re still looking for Hallie.
Chanton Jenkins was drunk.
Tracy Easley, who was the mother of victims Hallie and Karrinton, described how she found out about the crash. She said she was talking to Chanton on the cell phone when she suddenly lost contact with him. She felt a pang of fear and rushed to the area where she thought he had been driving. Police officers at the scene had to hold her back.
“I knew,” she said.
The Houston Chronicle had a great article, which quoted several family member as they talked about the children. I couldn’t improve on their words in a million years:
Family members remembered the children as sweet and fun-loving.
Easley described Karrinton as “the boss of the family.”
“She was the baby in the family and she ran everything. Hallie was the princess. She was the little diva,” Easley said. “She was prissy and she always walked on her tiptoes.”
Devin was a little pistol who liked to challenge everything he was told, Easley said.
Brothers Malik and Dreyton played football and basketball and participated on a step team that their 24-year-old uncle Travis Campbell helped organize.
“If you knew them, you would have just fallen in love with them,” said Malik’s godmother Tywanna Harris.
The two were inseparable.
“If Dreyton had a chance to get out of that car, I bet he thought, not without my brother. That was just his mentality,” said the boys’ aunt, Sonya Diamond.
“The waiting is just horrible,” said Valerie Jones, a cousin of the victims.
That’s an awful lot of people who are suffering right now because one man chose to drink and drive. And this doesn’t take into account the mother of Devin, the parents of Malik and Dreyton, God knows how many sets of grandparents, and assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Collateral damage.
Chanton Jenkins has a criminal record in Harris County dating back to 1994, when he was charged with possession of a prohibited firearm, a felony. He received deferred adjudication of guilt, but court records show his probation was revoked in 1995 after he was convicted of unauthorized absence from a community correctional facility, another felony.
In 1997, Jenkins pleaded guilty to felony possession of a controlled substance and was sentenced to 10 months in state jail. Five years later, he was again convicted for felony possession of a controlled substance. This time he received a yearlong jail term. Most recently, he pleaded guilty to manufacturing and/or delivering a controlled substance and was sentenced to 10 months in state jail.
Chanton Jenkins was charged with four counts of intoxication manslaughter. Each carries a two to 20 year sentence and a fine of up to $10,000, according to Harris County District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Donna Hawkins.
Does Chanton Jenkins Deserve Hell?
- Yes (82%, 171 Votes)
- No (18%, 38 Votes)
Total Voters: 209
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46 Comments »
All those bleeding hearts ( aka James) who think this man deserves a chance to be rehabilitated should go visit with the childrens mothers and other relatives. See what they say. All those dead babies with bright futures ahead of them. Who knows what they could have achieved. But we will never know. They wont get to go to high school, experience their first crush, kiss someone, get a job, meet someone special, fall in love…have babies of their own. They have missed so much…living…just because this man could not obey the road rules and stay off the road after drinking.
Why should he get a second chance when they never will? And for that matter , why should Chanton’s brother get a second chance? At any time, knowing his brother had been drinking, he could have stopped those kids from getting in the car. Fools, the both of them. If they wanted to throw their lives away, so be it…but to throw away the lives of those kids? They had no fucking right to take such a risk.
At least he looks remorseful. If he was sitting there looking like “so what” i think i would have belted the screen.
The poor kids :(
I saw this when the story broke and it just made my heart sick. The selfishness of Chanton Jenkins to drink and then get behind the wheel. All those beautiful children dead and for what? No one (James are you listening) can ever tell me that driving under the influence isn’t evil. As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Jenkins should serve 5 life terms. My heart goes out to the families of these precious children.
There needs to be stiffer laws for drinking and driving it is an incrediblly self-fish act.
Very sad.
This is just heart wrenching. He better get the maximum sentence for all of this.
While drinking and driving is wrong, how many of these kinds of accidents would have happened anyway? Sometimes an accident is just an accident that would have happened either way.
That isn’t the point H. Chanton Jenkins was driving impaired with a car full of kids, which means both his judgment (talking on his cellphone during a heavy rainstorm) and his reflexes (losing control of the car) were screwed. He needed to be at his best in the situation he found himself in, but instead he was at his worst.
Are you effing kidding? 5 kids lives would have been saved if this moron @sshole wouldn’t have been drinking!!! He would have been sober and not landed in an effing ditch!
Zero as the cause of the accident was Driving Under the Influence.
Why do you say that Jason? According to Houston prosecutors, he registered .082 and .079 on a Breathalyzer two and a half hours after the accident. If my memory serves me right, that means he was at least .012 at the time of the crash, assuming he hadn’t drank at all after he began driving. I know there’s some speculation that he may have dropped the cell phone while he was talking, but even if that’s true it doesn’t excuse the DUI, at least IMHO.
Sorry Max, I think you missed the math/statistics question I was answering.
“..how many of these kinds of accidents would have happened anyway?”
No accident of this “kind” would have occurred “anyway” as alcohol mixed with driving was the cause of this…. Accident?
Does that clear up where I was coming from? I wasn’t trying to imply the negative, I was trying to state the answer to the “Begged” question.
No Jason, I’m sorry – Damn, I know I’m a little slow on the pickup, but this is horrible. This is good though. I need things like this to to keep my incredibly huge ego in check.
Embarrassment is the mother of humility.
Don’t worry… the concept is called Cognitive Dissonance.
It looked wrong to you, you didn’t think I would be wrong on this one, therefore you questioned why I was wrong, rather than question your own reading of it–you can call that ego, I just call it missing a negative in a statement. That’s a mistake even the extremely intelligent make.
For example, Benjamin Franklin managed to figure out that charge could be recorded by observing silk scratches on a piece of glass. He discovered it, but he got the charge of the object doing it wrong, not because he wasn’t smart enough, but because he looked at the observation and inverted the answer. It’s caused a great deal of problems for a lot of people in fields that deal with electrical diagrams. It explains this web comic: http://xkcd.com/567/
Another type of cognitive dissonance, however, is what James suffers from. He’s convinced he’s smarter than the people he’s arguing with here. He thinks the people here are akin to the intelligence level of children, specifically like he was as a child. He also has in his mind a set belief, he thinks is correct beyond all examination, but merely too complex for inferior minds to consider. What he fails to do is simplify the problem and test to see if anyone else has had this “mature” idea.
If he’d open up a book, and consider that most of modern discovery is at least based on previous examples, he might learn that someone, or in fact several someones had and even tried his ideas on for size.
I like your explanation better Jason, so we’ll go with that one. Thanks for understanding BTW, it’s pretty amazing how you read my mind.
I was lmao while reading your assessment of James. To be honest, he makes me a little nervous. He just seems a little”off” to me, and not in a nice, Robin Williams/Jonathan Winters kind of way, but more of a Hannibal Lecter, “…ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti” sort of way.
This is awful. And I like that point, Max, about collateral damage. Just like in the April Whang case, there are so many people who are left behind, hurting because of someones chosen actions. Their lives are turned upside down, they are left to grieve and ask “why?”
There is no reason why one person’s glutton-like actions should take so much from so many-for a lifetime. It is called selfish. Anyone who drinks and drives is selfish, plain and simple. I hope people learn from these stories and think before they make a decision which impacts themselves-and others forever.
And if they don’t think? Then they need to pay with prison or their lives. There is no rehabilitation for selfishness.
If you want to drink until you’re drunk, try my method: Go to the store, get your cigarrettes and all your snacks (more than you think you’ll need). Get a bottle of rum. Go home, and give your keys to your best friend. Proceed to the back yard with a book, drink the rum, and pass out on the porch swing.
WHA LA! You got drunk, and no one died, and you’re not in jail unless you took all your clothes off and ran around the neighborhood naked. In which case, you deserve to sober up in the county lockup.
Agreed.
and they keep raising the taxes on cigaretts. when is the last time someone died from smoking and driving? or beat their kids from too much nicotine. Money money money, our world is run by money and not common sense.
This happened not to far from me.
Who let the drunk guy take off with 5 kids?
People could die from smoking and driving. How many accidents are caused because the person was ‘distracted’? They could have been trying to open their drive thru coffee, trying to tune into a certain radio station, trying to find their lighter to light a smoke, etc., etc.. We don’t know what distracted them, but it does happen. So, it is possible.
yeah right. about a month ago, on the way home and right around the corner from it, my husband and i saw a guy in a suv trying to light a cigarette. this idiot jumped the curb, ran up on the sidewalk and tore up his bumper on metal fencing alongside a drainage ditch. mind you this is a road going through a neighborhood filled with children, and you can often find them riding bikes, skateboarding and walking up and down it.he was so lucky no kids were walking there that day, and i shudder everytime i’m driving past and see kids on the sidewalk in that spot. so if you think people can not be hurt or killed from smoking and driving, think again.
i wonder if that moron even learned his lesson.
this guy should be hung out to dry, i dont care what people say, unless they have had someone close to them lose they dont get it. someone very close to my family was hit by a drunk driver and ended up in the ICU of the local hospital, she took her last breath as she touched the head of the baby they took out via c-section., thats right, she was pregnant, and now that child who never got to know his mother and his 3 brothers at home, will never see their mother again because some jerk off thought he was stable enough to drive after drinking, at 3 in the afternoon he was blowing was above the legal limit.
This fella should drowned himself…..
Maybe we should consider allowing the mothers to use Texas’ Castle Domain Law and blow this cock sucker straight into hell
This has to be one of the sadest stories.
I think the whole family should go to hell, they all allowed and enabled the father to drive drunk with his children in the car…
God bless the children…I feel no pity for the “adults” in the situation…they know better.
I have no compassion for drunk drivers.
Many people drive after having a beer or two. While it is legal for most people, even with a beer or two response time is diminished a bit.
Then there are those who “can handle it” mostly because everyone else is forced to give such people a little more room, an extra second or two with the lights, etc….. Other people who can not accommodate “those who can handle it” end up hurt or dead……
This POS need to die – bottom of an outhouse – live his days out at the bottom – in preparation for what eternity will be!
Having grown up in this part of TX, I can tell you the roads there are extremely bad during storms. The storms are quite frequent and usually, when you are driving in them, you can’t see out your window at all…even with the windshield wipers at full speed. I remember having to pull over quite a few times because it was so bad. You have to drive pretty slow to keep from hydroplaning. Everything’s pretty flat there so water stays on the road.
For this man to even take those kids out in a storm like this at night is bad enough. For him to have been drinking and talking on a cell phone too…complete lack of responsibility. He deserves whatever he gets as a result…and I hope it’s the maximum. I only feel for the pain he must be going through…to know that he killed his children…killed others’ children? It’s got to be tearing him apart. At least I hope he is feeling that pain. That would give him a little bit of sympathy from me…but he still deserves to suffer for what he has done and all of the “collateral damage” he has caused. Great article. You made your point well.
becaise he was drinking no sympathy from me.
With the other factors, I can not say that this accident was avoidable or not.
BUT if he was not drunk MAYBE
1. He’d have been a little more scared of the storm, instead of acting invincible.
2. May have been driving slower
3. May have had faster reflexes and taken better evasive action
Thus what I am getting at is that if he were not intoxicated the accident may have been more like
1. He slides off road
2. He stops the car once off the road
3. Car is on mud – slowly going into ditch
4. Kids jump out
5. Empty car falls in ditch
6. Empty car sinks fast
7. Bunch of cold wet kids get sick
When I was talking about the conditions, I was saying it was irresponsible to be out driving in that in the first place. Being drunk just makes it 100 times worse.
Sympathy is not the same as getting a free pass in my book. I don’t mean they should go easy on him.
WTF????????? He was drinking, talking on a cellphon, and driving in heavy rain. Dangerous mix. Sickening!
the only break he will have is if he spends a lot of time in the prison , in there he cant see what he has done. the need to come up with another punishment to remind them every day what they did. prison is just a hideing place, somewhere to forget without all the other problems in life to go with it.
the 3 adults could have easily grabbed as many of the children as they possibly could and kept them afloat as to not let them drown…
all 3 deserve hell for not trying
fucking stupid ignorant racists think they can do whatever they want. I weep at the thought least this shitstain exterminated innocent children and not me and my aryan brothers. I guess we have to exterminate ourselves
POWER TO THE ARYANS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HITLER HAD TITS HITLER HAD TITS
HITLER HAD HUGE MOTHER TITS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DEATH TO ALL NOT PURE BLOODED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
what? No one in the United States is Pure Blooded?????????????????????
Oh my, are the voices calling to you?
Nobody is pure blooded.
That whole Aryan religion is just a fallacy.
Hitler was stupid, and a puss as well.
The man killed himself…coward.
No one with Blond Hair and Blue eyes is Aryan at all. The term best suits the dark to light skinned, sharp jawed people of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Swastika represented Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva a thousand years before the birth of Christ and around three thousand years before Hitler. A nutjob (technical term) named Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, French, under-educated and thoroughly insane babbler who claimed White People were descended from the Indo-European “Aryans” built the initial foundations for this garbage, basically because he pulled it out of his nether regions and supported his opinions by making them up on the spot. If you can read French you can read his original works and learn that for yourself. If you can’t read French you can read Adrian Collins’ English translation of The Inequality of the Human Races online at Google Books.
This little English nugget is marked in that version:
“If is certain that no civilization falls to the ground unless God wills it; and when we apply to the mortal state of all societies the sacred formula used buy the ancient priesthoods to explain some striking catastrophes, which they wrongly considered as isolated facts, we are asserting a truth of the first importance, which should govern the search for all truths of this world.”
by that reasoning, since the Nazi’s failed in their pursuit of world conquest, God willed it and with it, willed most of this garbage, null and void. Since only Nietzsche, Hitler and Gobineau are the primary sources of this garbage, I see no reason given other discrediting to give this Aryan myth much more consideration.
WHY thank you Jason. GEE, I did NOT know that…which was why I said that it was a “fallacy” which would mean that it was a lie, right?
Considering my father knows mucho grande about history, because he’s a history nerd (as much as he knows, he could TEACH IT.), I know quite a bit about the WWII era…because that’s his fave era.
Myths, and all.
I know Hitler didn’t generate it, but he thought that the Aryans were a perfect race, thus rendering him stupid, because actually there is no such race.
He did kill himself in his underground bunker though. Cyanide pill and a 42 Ruger to the right temple. Bit down on the pill as he pulled the trigger.
What a wimp.
Chump could have faced prison like a man.
Sorry, my response was additive, not combative in nature. remember the tone of a post is difficult to understand on the Internet.
No need to apologize, Jason.
I’m the one who misinterpreted…being a psych major, I should have sat down and processed your post before I popped off at the mouth.
I have a habit of doing that.
So…the apology is from me.
You are right…tone on the internet is very difficult to understand on the internet..
:)
I saw the original unedited post. Dude are u fucking stupid?! Its Sieg Heil not Zien Hiet. Hitler would roll over in his grave if he knew the garbage you are spewing pretending to be Aryan. You are no better than all these suburban white kids pretending to be members of the crips, bloods, and other inferior nigger gangs cause just like them you are fake just trying to belong to something to compensate for your own insecurities. I know some real Aryans that will tear your ass up if they ever heard you spewing that fake skinhead bullshit, you cant just shave your head and become a storm trooper overnight. I think its time for you to get off mommy and daddys computer and go to bed junior.
Maybe I’m missing some sarcasm here, but I have to ask: Are you stupid? I personally could give a rats ass if Hitler was rolling over in his rat infested, leper latrine of a grave. “Storm Trooper”? WTF is this, Star Wars??! Please neuter yourself. And don’t bother to clean off whatever instrument you decide upon. I’d love to see “a Real Aryan” sometime so I could laugh at his ass until he turned a proper redneck red.
LOL…
Hitler isn’t in a grave. His original remains were found in a pit by the Soviets. Some of the soldiers at the time took photos holding Hitler’s remains. They then reburied the remains eight different times before incinerating them in 1970, after which the ashes were miked with charcoal and thrown into a river. He isn’t going to be rolling in his grave, at best he’s going to be rolling on a river, but I digress.
I have no fear of Hitler. In fact I have no fear of his ideas, because while you cannot kill an idea like you can kill a person, you can kill wrong ideas with time and careful experiment. The hate crimes legislation passed today. While I have many conservative leaning feelings, many know that I am also a bleeding heart on many areas. Let’s call my beliefs more libertarian, most times I simply want the vast majority of people left alone. I have exclusions. I want Drunk Drivers executed when they take a life. I want hate crimes punished with the same expediency. I want the masks off and the names broadly proclaimed when someone comes out and decides to denigrate an actual race, in the presentation of a made up race.
These are merely my opinions of the matter. If you have some Aryans you’d like to send to my home, I have a Sheriff’s deputy who lives across the street who’d be happy to talk to them.
Alana, this was not directed at you. Just thought I’d clarify.
HAHA NP I’m pretty hard to offend =)
In fact, I rather like history
You start this essay by asking whether people who have diminished mental capacity due to intoxication have a lesser moral responibility. You call intoxication “a poor excuse” and then go on to describe the consequences of driving while intoxicated.
There was never any question about the consequences. But you never got around to saying whether or why a person who is intoxicated has moral responsibility. The only reason for you to feel frustrated is your inability to make an argument.