The Missouri governor wants you to forget what Britt Reid did. Don’t.
Please, take one moment, and remember exactly what Britt Reid did.
This was essentially a gift to the Reid family months before Christmas. If you look up privilege in the dictionary, there’s Britt, peacing out of prison early, cruising home, being allowed to put behind him the damage he did to a then 5-year-old girl named Ariel Young due to him driving while intoxicated, damage she may never fully put behind her. The timing of the commutation couldn’t be more glaring coming just weeks after Kansas City won the Super Bowl.
Maybe there are other people who get sentences commuted after nearly killing a little girl. I’d like to see those examples and compare them to Reid’s. I’m guessing they don’t exist because not everyone is the son of a Super Bowl coach under the protection of a terrible governor.
‘The family is disgusted, I am disgusted, and I believe that the majority of the people in the state of Missouri are disgusted by the governor’s actions,’ said the lawyer for Ariel’s family, Tom Porto. ‘If you drink and drive and you put a little girl in a coma, you should have to serve the entire sentence that a judge of this state gave you.’
Porto also provided to the Star a statement from Ariel’s mother, Felicia Miller, who asked: “How would the governor feel if this was his daughter? It seems the laws don’t apply equally to the haves and have nots. The haves get favors. The have nots serve their sentence.’
But I also want you to focus on something else besides the glaring privilege and cronyism. Please, take one moment, and remember exactly what Britt Reid did.
Because the governor doesn’t want you to do that. So do it. Remember what happened, and according to various media reports, including the Star, this is what occurred:
Prosecutors said that Britt Reid was driving 83 mph two seconds before the crash on an Interstate highway. They also said his blood alcohol content was 0.113 approximately two hours before his vehicle collided into the one carrying Ariel, who was five at the time of the accident. The legal limit, according to Missouri law, is 0.08.
The crash put Ariel in a coma for 11 days, the Star reported. Reid, in November of 2022, was sentenced to three years in prison.
Reid hasn’t made just one tragic mistake. He has a history of them. There’s no proof that he’s someone who can go lengthy periods of time in his life without getting arrested or hurting another human being. In 2008, while out on bail because of a road rage charge, he pled guilty to DUI and drug related charges coming from an entirely separate incident.
In the road rage incident, Reid pled guilty to flashing a gun at another motorist during a 2007 incident. He was sentenced to eight to 23 months in prison.
Remember all of that, too.
Reid hasn’t done anything to warrant any type of commuted sentence. A spokesperson for Gov. Mike Parson’s office said on Friday that “Mr. Reid has completed his alcohol abuse treatment program and has served more prison time than most individuals convicted of similar offenses.”
That may or may not be true but what’s certain is that not only is caution warranted with someone like Reid, it’s mandatory. He doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.
What the governor is also doing with that statement is trying to get you to forget exactly what happened. He wants you to forget about Ariel.
So, please, take one moment, and remember what Britt Reid did.