At about noon on April 6, 1999, Melissa Lynn Marvin, twenty-nine, a waitress living in Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina's Outer Banks, went into a bar in Nags Head and drank two margaritas without eating. At about one o'clock she moved to a restaurant and drank three shots of Rumple Minze, a hundred-proof schnapps, still without eating. The bartender warned her not to try to drive to Williamsburg, Virginia, where she was going to a concert. She drove anyway.
Shortly before three, witnesses saw her Mitsubishi Montero weaving through traffic on Highway 158 in Kill Devil Hills at fifty to sixty miles an hour in a fifty zone, with her left foot up on the dashboard. At the intersection with the 158 bypass she ran a red light and broadsided a Chevrolet Cavalier that was turning left on the green. Five seventeen-year-olds were in the car. Shana Lawler's family had recently moved to Colington, on the Outer Banks, and her four friends had come down from New Jersey for spring break. Megan Blong, who was driving, Amanda Geiger and Angela McGrady were killed at once. Shana Lawler died six days later. Michael Horner, in the front passenger seat, survived with serious injuries. Marvin had minor injuries.
She had driven drunk before; she had previous convictions for driving while impaired. North Carolina had begun treating that kind of history as the malice needed for murder, and the Dare County district attorney charged her with four counts of second-degree murder and one of assault with a deadly weapon. Her lawyer, Michael Sanders of Elizabeth City, later said the court clerk's office had called him pleading with him to take the case. "No lawyer in Dare County would touch it," he said.
The trial in Manteo, in January 2000, lasted a week and drew national coverage. Horner testified that Megan had waited for the green before she pulled into the intersection. The prosecutor, Amber Davis, reminded the jury of the foot on the dashboard. The jury deliberated for about four and a half hours and found her guilty on every count. Marvin, who had sobbed through much of the testimony, did not react. At sentencing she spoke in court for the first time, facing the victims' families. "I'm so sorry for everything that happened," she said. "I never intended to hurt anyone. There's not a malicious bone in my body."
Superior Court Judge Jerry Tillett heard about two hours of testimony from the families and from Marvin, then ran the sentences consecutively: 174 to 218 months for each of the four murders and 24 to 29 months for the assault, a minimum of about sixty years. "I don't know how I could have said to one parent your child's life didn't matter," he said. The North Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions in an unpublished opinion in 2002. The families also brought dram-shop suits in 2000 against the businesses that had served her.
The Baltimore Sun, reporting on the case from Kitty Hawk, saw in it a state grafting murder law onto drunk-driving cases, and quoted a state appellate defender who warned that people could be tried for murder in North Carolina for having a few beers and accidentally killing someone. At the crash site, four white crosses went up, marked Megan, Angie, Amanda and Shana, beside a sign that read "Drinking + Driving Can Cost You a Precious Gem." Twenty years later a retired Kill Devil Hills police captain, Mark Evans, the second officer at the scene, said the case had changed how drunk-driving cases were prosecuted there, with fewer charges reduced and fewer light sentences.