I too have encountered 2 drunk driving incidents. The first was a friend that was walking to baseball pratice and he was hit while walking on the sidewalk. The guy was never found. It was a hit & run. Worse part was that I blamed myself for the longest time after I found out that he left earlier to catch up with me, as I'm usually the one on that sidewalk around that timeframe. But I decided to get to practice earlier for a game that week. Even though I know it's that driver's fault, but I always felt the burden.
The other was a friend that was drinking & driving. He had his 3 closest friends in the car, and he lost control on the freeway. He was the only one not wearing a seatbelt & he was thrown from the car as it was flipping. If I recall correctly, he said that it flipped about 8 times. Everybody in the car died. He is now paralized from the mid-trunk down. His friends' family would not let him attend their funerals and refused to speak to him after that incident.
Regarding to the observation in that the drunk drivers are usually the one that survives is not really because of their "drunk" body by itself, but rather via simple physics. If you have a moving object and it come in contact with another object, that force will translate into the stationary object. It's like a cue ball hitting the 8 ball. The forces will transfer upon contact, unless the two mass merges which will then share the force. Since most drunk drivers usually has some speed [as they will run through a red light] if they don't have the additional mass (more damaging if they have a SUV/truck hitting a standard car) and their victims usually acquired very little speed. Which is also why drunk drivers have a higher casuality rate if they hit an object with more mass: i.e, they hit a building, tree, ground, semi, etc... In that case it's like trying to push a wall, it displaces an equal amount of force to maintain their mass/position. Which is why if the car flips, the ground pushes all that force upon the car & combine that with the additional centrifugal forces (if they flip) which is probably why the friends died and he did not.
I've learned from his mistakes, as through college there were a lot of parties, but we always took the responsibility seriously as one would always be sober & be the designated driver. And if something would arise, we always had an alternative means via cab, or simply "walk it off" as we called it.
