Christian Mayer was out celebrating her 30th birthday with some friends when she got a call from her next-door neighbor. The night was still young—it was only 8:30—and the Oak Cliff townhome owner was excited to “end [her] 20s with a bang.” But her festivities were cut short when, on the phone call that interrupted her celebratory dinner, she learned that a drunk driver had barrelled through her home, and it was now on fire.
The internet was ignited by the viral video of the drunk driver who hit Mayer’s home. In the jarring clip, a whizzing car buzzes over the roundabout connecting the intersection of Tyler Street and Polk Street, skipping like a stone across a pond, before somersaulting into a fiery blaze on the evening of May 8. In February, a similar sequence, a reckless driver accelerating up the steep Tyler Street, fails to decelerate before banking into the roundabout, pummeling over the circle, etching deep tire tracks in unkept weeds and wildflowers, before flip-flopping onto the pavement on the other side.
The angle of the videos, which have been recirculated by many local publications and even made their way to CNN, conveniently excludes footage of the cars crashing through the wood siding of the townhomes. In February, the car drove through the home across from Mayer’s unit like a bullet, going in one side and out the other, creating an unwanted breezeway…