Halloween dangerous weekend for pedestrians, drivers

Law enforcement agencies across mid-Missouri are cracking down on drunk driving this weekend, as they often do on holiday weekends. Some agencies say Halloween has as many drunk driving incidents as Saint Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve.

From 2007 through 2011, across the United States 52% of the traffic fatalities that happened that were drunk driving related. In Missouri in 2015, two people died in traffic crashes over the Halloween weekend. As of Sunday morning, at least seven people in mid-Missouri had been arrested on suspicion of DUI; two people in Cooper County, two in Morgan County, one in Cole County and one in Osage County. The seventh arrest happened in Columbia after an alleged drunk driver slammed into the back of a car.

In mid-Missouri this Halloween weekend there have also been at least three traffic related deaths, however it is not confirmed if they involved alcohol. Early Saturday morning, two drivers died in a wrong-way wreck on I-70 in Columbia. A second crash killed a 21-year-old man from Cole County.