When Brad Patrick died in an alcohol-related collision Dec. 29, 1989, the rest of his family’s life changed. So did a lot of people’s lives in Rowan County.

With the announcement of Charlie McBride Jr.’s release from prison — after serving nine years of a 25-year sentence —Terry Patrick says his campaign against drinking and driving is going to take a different avenue.

“We are still going to do what we have been doing, but it is just going to take a different avenue now that he will be free,” Terry Patrick said.

He frequently speaks to groups about his son’s death. From discussing his grief and the healing process to the legal system and victim’s rights procedures, Patrick has used his loss to help others.

Terry and his wife, Lynne, welcome reporters and photographers into their home and are open to share their story that started 10 years ago.

“There hasn’t been a year that has gone by that people haven’t written about it,” Lynne said.

The Patricks knew they would see the day when McBride was released from prison.

In their wood-colored home not far from the scene of the accident, not far from Brad’s high school and not far from his grave, the Patricks see daily reminders of their 15-year-old son.

Terry Patrick still wears his son’s watch that an N.C. Highway Patrol trooper found at the scene of the accident.

Lynne Patrick still cries when she thinks about the last time she saw Brad.

“We had gotten into a little argument about,” she thinks back, “about who was going to drive home.” But before Lynne left Brad and his friend Stacy Gainey at Catawba College for the basketball game, “He was smiling and I was smiling and we just went our own ways,” Lynne says with tears in her eyes. But she is comforted by the knowledge that she and her son left each other on good terms.

“Sometimes when me and Tara get into an argument, you say, ‘This just isn’t worth it. It isn’t that big of a deal,’ ” Lynne said.

Tara, Brad’s little sister, was 12 years old when he died. “She had her own way of grieving,” Terry said.

They take down a framed picture collage that Tara made about a year after Brad died. “Friends Forever” spelled out in magazine letters tops more than 20 pictures.

“That was her therapy,” Lynne says.

The Patricks have gone through most of the healing process but they still have questions about McBride and whether his sentence was really effective.

“Has he really gained a regard for the law?“Lynne asks. “Is his license still permanently revoked? Will he just go back into the same environment he was in and do this again?”

No one could be reached from the McBride family, but past articles have quoted friends and family as saying McBride has changed.

Their day in court

“In my mind, all we wanted in the beginning was to have our day in court, we wanted the judge to give the jury the option of second-degree murder and we wanted the jury to decide. That is all we were hoping for,” Terry Patrick said.

But Brad’s death went so far beyond that goal. His picture was used in a national drunk driving campaign. Terry still carries around the 1995 YM and 1992 Seventeen ads that used Brad’s picture.

And in 1991, Reader’s Digest featured an article about Brad’s death and McBride’s conviction.

Their son’s case has become a key trial in drunk driving convictions and “making the penalty fit the crime” as Terry Patrick said.

“It was critical in some of these later convictions. Of course we had to stand up. We couldn’t roll over. We said we don’t want involuntary death, we want first-degree murder,” Patrick said of cases since his son’s.

In 1990, hundreds of Rowan County students traveled to Raleigh to help push a senate bill that would tighten drunk driving laws.

“Most of that was an awareness thing. …We were planning it within a couple of months of burying him. …We just wanted to be there,” Terry Patrick said of the trip.

But many of the students returned disappointed.

Terry Patrick said society let McBride on the road time and time again until he killed his son.

“This man should have been in prison before this, but as a society in general, we let him out,” Patrick said.

Three years later, the laws that the students were standing up for finally changed.

“We feel like we were a part of that. It’s not something that happens overnight,” Patrick said.

“There were some circumstances where he should have already been in prison,” Patrick said. “I don’t have any feelings towards him one way or the other.I hope that this has helped him change. I don’t know that it has. I don’t know that our prison system is set up for that.”

“I know that we kept him in prison, much, much longer than anyone expected we would,” Patrick said.

“Now the parole commission has a division of victims services that helps people,” Patrick said. “For a long time I was getting treated worse than he was. I feel like some things have changed and I think we were a part of it and other people were a part of it.”

Tara will graduate from college in May. “She is going to go into something like this helping people. She’s a criminal justice minor,” Terry Patrick said.

“As a family, initially you deal with it as individuals, then you come back together and deal with it as a family, because you get to the same level.”

“Really our grief and mourning process didn’t start till May or June afterwards,” Patrick said.

SADDChapter

Students Against Drunk Driving.

Brad Patrick would have graduated from East Rowan High School, so in his honor, the SADDchapter uses his name to represent the group.

“In May 1997, we did the presentation to the Patricks at our banquet,” Ann Heard, director of the East Rowan Brad Patrick SADDChapter, said.

And Brad’s tragedy still touches students today, most of whom were in first grade or younger when he died.

The Brad Patrick Chapter carries the highest enrollment in the state with about 180 students involved.

And the students also involves law enforcement officers.

Heard contacted some law enforcement officers and started a program to keep Brad’s name visible.

Officers receive a hat embroidered with the number of drunk driving charges they issue every other month. Heard said the officers are honored to wear the hats.

Lynne Patrick said Brad’s cousin, a Spencer Police officer, received his first hat. “It meant so much to Nick,” Lynne said.

“We keep it before them, so they won’t forget it,” Heard said of the current students who didn’t attend East Rowan when Brad died. “It’s an accident that is 100 percent preventable and we keep trying to press that.”