HOUSTON -- Honorato Marcos Rios, 24, is locked up behind bars in the Preston E. Smith Unit, a state prison in LaMesa, an hour south of Lubbock.
11 News traveled there because Rios wanted, not to offer excuses for his crimes or complain about his 20-year sentence, but to offer a warning to anyone else who might be following in his footsteps.
His is a decidedly tragic story, but the tragedy is not just his own.
“Initially when I found out, I had so much rage,” Gloria Robles told us from her home in San Antonio.
Her rage was born on the Katy Freeway on Oct. 4, 2008. Her home in Texas City had been heavily damaged by Hurricane Ike. With her mom driving and her two young daughters in the backseat asleep in their car seats, she was returning to San Antonio to temporarily live with family.
“I looked back at the rearview mirror and I saw the car swerving,” Robles said.
Marcos Rios was driving that swerving car. Traffic had slowed for construction in the westbound lanes just past the Beltway. But Rios did not stop in time.
“I could hear people screaming, and I could hear my mom crying,” Robles said.
Both Robles and her mother were severely injured in the crash. But there were no cries coming rom the backseat. Investigators believe 8-month-old Amber and 22-month-old Angelica died on impact when Rios' Cadillac CTS crushed the entire backseat of Robles' Fort Taurus.
“I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it,” said Rios of the crash scene.
He was able to crawl out of his wrecked car and run toward Robles and her family. But there was nothing he could do.
“I think if I would have seen him at that time, I probably would have been on trial for murder because I wanted him to hurt the way I did,” Robles said. “He hurt me more than anybody has hurt me in this life.”
Rios hurt them because he was drunk. Tests showed his blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit.
His case did not go to trial. Prosecutors charged him with intoxication manslaughter. He accepted a sentence of 20 years.
“I just couldn’t believe that I could do something like that and it was all because of just stupidity and I just didn’t want to reach out and get help,” Rios said.
The help he admits he needed was for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. At the time of the crash, Rios had only recently returned from a 25-month tour of duty in Iraq. The Army specialist says he witnesses the deaths of at least three of his close friends.
One assignment had him on a quick-reaction force responding to insurgent attacks. He was ordered to recover fellow U.S. soldiers who had died in the explosion of a roadside bomb.
“We couldn’t tell who was who, and what parts were whose. You just had to pick them up and put them in body bags,” Rios said.
He says he was also haunted by the image of another soldier who died in a Humvee that caught fire. The soldier who died had offered to take Rios’ place on the mission.
“The whole vehicle caught fire and he was trapped inside. He was the only one who couldn’t get out. And that was pretty much a seat I should have been taking,” Rios said.
When he came home with all those images stored in his head, he didn’t ask for help. He didn’t ask for counseling for post-traumatic stress. Instead, he drank.
“It kept me calm,” he said. “It was easier to count days that you didn’t [drink] than days that you did."
The drinking soothed his demons, until it killed two little girls.
Rios said he does not offer his experiences in Iraq or his diagnosis of PTSD as an excuse for what he did on the Katy Freeway. He offers it as a warning to other soldiers, and for that matter, any other driver who might consider getting behind the wheel intoxicated.
“I know what I did was wrong,” he said. “I got this punishment and I think it's what I deserve. I just hope that people won't follow, like what I did, and they will actually go out and get help. Cause this isn't what you want to do. This isn't what anybody wants to do."
The crash that killed Robles’ two young daughters also left her paralyzed from the chest down.
“I'm never going to be able to walk again and I don't have my girls and I'm just stuck in a chair for the rest of my life," she said.
Rios talked about the search for forgiveness.
"I don't know if any words I say will ever be good enough,” he said. “And I just hope that she can forgive me somehow, so I can someday forgive myself.”
Robles said she's already forgiven him.
"I wrote that I forgave him,” she said of the statement she had planned to read at his sentencing. “Because that's what God teaches us, is to forgive those who trespass against you."
"I thought about it and I realized the girls wouldn't want me to live my life like that,” she said.
And there was another reason for her to release her rage, too. Her name is Jalen. Robles, although paralyzed, was able to give birth again.
She and her husband welcomed the baby girl 5 months ago. Jalen is giving Gloria a reason to live, and even more reason to fight against drunk drivers.
"I look at Jalen and I realize that not everything is bad in this world," she said.
But part of her world is forever buried in the corner of a San Antonio cemetery. Amber and Angelica are buried side by side in a section of the San Jose Burial Park called Babyland. She visits her daughters twice a week.
And it’s an image she and Rios hope every driver and every soldier will remember.
"In reality everybody is a victim and they really shouldn't drink and drive because it just ruins everybody's life,” said Robles.
The Veterans Administration estimates that as many as 20 percent of the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from some level of PTSD, but only a fraction of them seek help or mental counseling. Rios admits the stigma of appearing “weak” keeps most soldiers away and leads them to try self-medicating the problem.
Rios was diagnosed with PTSD after the crash. He received treatment at the Houston VA and helped bring other veterans to the VA’s treatment programs.
He hopes that telling his story will make even more of his fellow soldiers seek help.
