The man you don't want to see after midnight

SANDY — When he reaches the front porch, Jim Brierley pauses before ringing the doorbell, but he knows it’s too late. Somebody’s life is about to be shattered.

If there is a more wrenching task than telling a spouse or a parent that their loved one died late at night on the highway, Brierley cannot think of one.

“It’s the toughest thing we do,” says the Utah Highway Patrol trooper, “and you hate to do it. Two people knocking on your door in uniform at 2 in the morning is never good news. But I know that the family needs to know. If it were my child, I would want to know.”

The grim task is even more painful when the bad news has to be delivered over the holidays, says Brierley, who has seen the results of too many highway accidents that could have been prevented if people had been wearing seat belts, driving the speed limit or had said “no” to that extra glass of champagne before climbing into the driver’s seat.

With a weekend of New Year revelry ahead, Brierley, who first donned a UHP uniform in 1980, thought it would be a good idea to remind people to “drive sober, drive safe and drive beyond the end of your car hood.”

“Even if it takes just an extra half-second for an impaired driver to react to what’s ahead on the interstate, that half-second is equal to 100 feet at 70 miles an hour,” he says during a Free Lunch break at Sandy’s Olive Garden. “In an ideal world, people would stay home to drink, but they don’t. This is a problem that isn’t going away.”

With that thought in mind, Brierley and his colleagues leave their family celebrations to suit up on every holiday, knowing that each time they pull over a suspected drunk driver, they might be saving another person’s life.

“If you see a burning building and help get the people out, you’ve saved their lives, no question,” says Brierley, “but when I get a drunk driver off the road, you don’t hear thanks for that. We don’t expect it — we’re just doing our jobs. People don’t equate preventing something from happening to saving lives, even though we may have done just that.”

Although he is called to work in almost every snowstorm and on every holiday weekend, Brierley, 56, who is an alcohol technician for the UHP, wouldn’t have it any other way. Since the first grade, he had only two big goals in life: To join the Navy and to become a state trooper.