Cathy Andreozzi sits with her daughter as Tori does her occupational therapy at Sargent Rehabilitation Center, in Warwick. Tori, 17, was severely injured five years ago when she was struck by a car driven by a drunken driver. The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

It was three years before anyone heard Tori Lynn Andreozzi laugh again.

It wasn’t like her old laugh, but it gave a flash of hope.

Since being hit by a drunken driver in March 2003, Tori cannot move most of her body. The 17-year-old with the long ponytail sometimes stares intently at her family and caregivers, as if about to speak. When she does, her voice is a moan. Occasionally, she’ll smile.

“Hello, baby girl,” her mother whispers to her. Tori sometimes gives her a sideways grin.

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Tori was a karate world champion at 12. Photo by Sergio Esteireiro / www.SERGIOLIMITED.com

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Cathy Andreozzi's family will never be the same

At the ACI, Marilyn Brownell is four years through her 10-year sentence

Your turn: Do longer prison sentences deter drunken drivers?

PDF: Read the court transcript from Brownell's sentencing

Video: Watch world champion Tori Andreozzi,12, host a Maine karate competition

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No one is sure what Tori knows.

When a physical therapist lifts Tori’s 5-foot frame and harnesses her to a machine that hoists the girl to her feet, does Tori remember when she was 12 and a black belt in karate and could kick her legs over her head?

When a speech therapist gently rubs Tori’s lips, above a heavy scar across the girl’s chin, does Tori remember begging her mother to ask the young woman at the MAC cosmetics counter at Warwick Mall to apply her makeup?

And when Tori wakes in the night crying and screaming, is she reliving the sudden blow from behind, when a neighbor’s car rammed into her? Or does she know the life that she’s lost?

Cathy Andreozzi says her daughter’s eyes have always been expressive, and sometimes she sees the old Tori looking back. “I don’t know if it’s the most hopeful thing or tragic thing that I believe she’s in there,” Andreozzi says.

Marilyn Brownell, the driver, no longer lives down the street from the Andreozzis. She’s inmate #534321 and lives in wing E in the Dorothea Dix minimum security prison for women, part of the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston.

Brownell, now 53, was a graphic artist who owned a company that assisted in staging events for major corporations. That ended in July 2004, when she was handcuffed and led off to prison for 10 years after pleading no contest to driving while intoxicated and causing serious bodily injury.

Murals and inspirational quotes, many about rebuilding lives, are painted on walls near Brownell’s room. She sleeps on the bottom of a metal bunk bed in a room she shares with seven other women. Two women on the same wing are serving 10-year sentences for killing people in drunken-driving crashes.

Marilyn Brownell, inmate #534321 at the Adult Correctional Institutions, in Cranston, sits at the window by her bed in a minimum security unit. She has taken many classes, attended counseling and helped others get GEDs while in prison. The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

Brownell has books on spirituality at the end of her mattress. Stacks of Architectural Digest magazine are in her metal locker. She passes time taking classes, helping inmates prepare for the GED, drawing portraits of inmates’ children, and going to rehab meetings.

In December, Brownell saw a photo of Tori Lynn Andreozzi on the front page of The Providence Journal, accompanying an article about drinking and driving. Brownell saved the photo and wrote to the reporter: “Maybe someday we could talk about what it’s like to be the perpetrator of the crime and how I live with the guilt of what I have done, or maybe talk about what it’s like to serve a 10-year sentence.”

When Brownell was convicted, she became part of a growing trend, in which drunken drivers who injure or kill people are more likely to go to prison –– under longer sentences –– than they were more than 10 years ago. The law sets sentences from 1 to 10 years for drunken drivers who injure others, and 1 to 15 years for those who kill.

A decade ago, few drunken drivers convicted of killing or injuring people served more than five years in prison, if at all. Now, a drunken driver who seriously injures someone usually goes to prison. Of the 26 cases from 2003 to 2007 in which someone was killed, half of the drivers were sent to prison for eight years or more, according to statistics from the attorney general’s office and the state judiciary system. The attorney general is supporting legislation to increase the maximum sentences up to 30 years for drunken drivers who kill, and up to 20 years for those who cause serious injuries.

Brownell had believed she would get a one- or two-year sentence, with home confinement. She was stunned when the judge sentenced her to the full 10 years. “Your first reaction is, your life is over,” she said, inside an echoing prison conference room. “It’s very scary to exist in an environment as flat and sterile as this is, a toxic environment. People aren’t happy here. People aren’t going about being well and constructive.”

She says she thinks about Tori. She also thinks about her sentence and wonders why she is serving as much as drunken drivers who have killed people.

“In the beginning, I used to think that anything I could do to help the family feel better was appropriate. … But with drunk driving [sentences], is there another way?” she said. “I always felt I’d be better off on a pro-active sentence.”

THE BROWNELLS and Andreozzis lived six houses apart in West Warwick, on the edge of the Warwick city line. Cathy and Robert Andreozzi have two children, Tori, and her older brother, Robbie, and their lives revolved around the children’s karate competitions. Tori emulated Robbie and followed him into the karate world when she was only 5. A local newspaper profiled them: “The Family that Kicks Together Sticks Together.”

Marilyn and Malcolm Brownell lived around the corner from them on East Greenwich Avenue. MCB Productions, her business, brought her into contact with high-profile clients, for graphic design and multimedia work at events. He works for the state Department of Transportation.

The families didn’t know each other until March 26, 2003, the day of the crash.

Just a few days before, Tori had competed as a black belt and cohosted an online kids karate show at the “Battle of Maine” competition, in Winslow, Maine.

Marilyn Brownell was drinking and feeling suicidal.

On March 25, the day before the crash, Brownell visited a local liquor store twice, buying several bottles of wine. Brownell looked disheveled, which the clerk said was unusual.

The morning of the crash, Brownell bought two bottles of wine, telling the clerk she was using them for cooking.

Just after 2 p.m., Tori and Robbie had gotten off the school bus on East Greenwich Avenue and were walking on the shoulder toward a neighbor’s house, where there was a cut-through to their yard on Greenbush Avenue. Tori, 12, was a few feet ahead when Robbie, 15, heard a car roaring behind them.

A blue BMW with “MCB” on its license plate whooshed by, almost hitting him. He saw the car swerve onto the shoulder and slam into Tori from behind. Her body flipped over the hood and tumbled onto the dirt. The car sped away, leaving a cloud of dust that witnesses said reached as high as the utility lines.

When the dust cleared, Robbie saw his sister on the ground.

At home with the door open to catch the early spring breezes, Cathy Andreozzi heard a boy howling in despair, and knew it was her son.

THE IMPACT knocked Tori out of her sneakers. She was motionless, eyes rolled back, mouth gushing blood. One foot was torn open, and half of her face had been ripped apart.

West Warwick police Lt. Al Giusti found Cathy Andreozzi cradling Tori in her arms, as her father, Robert, cried and screamed.

Robbie had found the car’s mirror in the leaves, and he told Patrolman Scott Thornton about the blue hatchback that had hit his sister.

On the way to Kent Hospital, Tori’s heart stopped in the ambulance. Cathy Andreozzi could see it in the face of one of the EMTs trying to keep her daughter alive. The gash across Tori’s mouth had pooled blood in her airway, blocking her oxygen for several minutes.

“Mommy’s here,” she told her daughter.

At Kent, the family had only a moment with Tori before she was transferred to Hasbro Children’s Hospital, in Providence.

“Time stood still,” Cathy Andreozzi said recently. “You didn’t know if it would be the last moment together as a family.”

AN OFFICER drove Robbie to Kent following the ambulance. As they passed a two-car accident on Quaker Lane in Warwick, Robbie saw the car that hit his sister.

Brownell had rear-ended a car at a traffic light. She tried to drive off when the police arrived, and she fought as she was arrested, according to a police report. Her husband drove up, frantic. “Those damn pills, I told the doctor,” Malcolm Brownell said, according to a police report. “She’s a recovering alcoholic and she’s been on the wagon for a year.”

Marilyn Brownell had just come from another liquor store, where a clerk noticed cuts on her face and a look of shock in her eyes. The police found two unopened bottles of Merlot on the passenger seat.

Brownell failed a field sobriety test and refused a breath test. She told the police conflicting stories about when she’d last drunk alcohol — over the weekend, seven months ago, a year ago. She said she’d taken the anti-anxiety drug Xanax the night before; later, she said she’d had several pills that day, with a bottle of wine. A blood test showed her blood-alcohol level would have been .18 when she hit Tori — more than twice the legal limit. She tested positive for prescription drugs.

Investigators removed Tori’s blood and hair from Brownell’s two-year-old BMW 325 IT. Scrapings from the child’s pink and black bookbag were on the passenger door handle. The police seized a quarter-pound of marijuana, prescription drugs and empty wine and beer bottles from the Brownells’ house.

THAT NIGHT at Hasbro, a pediatric trauma surgeon gave a statement to the police: Tori had a broken leg and pelvis, but the most serious problem was a closed head injury. “Her condition is critical, and her immediate course over the next 24 hours is not completely predictable at this time,” the doctor said.

Until her arraignment the next day, Brownell didn’t realize what she had done, she said recently. “When you find out this is what you’ve done to a child, someone’s daughter, a friend of a friend’s children, it brought me to the brink of madness. It was like a split from reality,” she said.

She pleaded not guilty and tried to suppress the results of her blood alcohol test. Fourteen months later, Brownell pleaded no contest.

Tori returned home from Franciscan Hospital for Children in Boston nine months after the crash. Doctors advised the family to put Tori in an institution. They refused. They would find a way to keep her home.

But they would never drive by the accident scene again.

BECAUSE THE CASE appeared headed for trial, it ended up on the calendar of Judge Stephen Nugent in Kent County Superior Court.

In his more than three decades in the legal system, Nugent has served as a special assistant attorney general, a trial lawyer with a private practice, and as the state’s public defender. The plainspoken Barrington man is a second-generation lawyer, a son of the late J. Joseph Nugent Jr., who’d been the state’s attorney general for nine years.

Nugent was in his fourth year as a Superior Court judge in 2004 and had handled tragic cases. This one, he said, “was already a serious case and tragic for all.”

During court conferences, Nugent said, he had questions. The defense lawyer was arguing that Brownell had a drinking problem. The judge asked if she’d sought intensive alcohol treatment. In the pre-sentencing report, there were statements that Brownell didn’t recognize that she’d done anything wrong, Nugent said recently. The judge said he was struck that she was more concerned about her business.

Does she get it? Nugent wondered.

The courtroom was packed at the sentencing in July 2004. The Brownells’ friends, family and people Marilyn Brownell knew through her business crowded the room. The Andreozzis sat together. The woman who had nearly killed Tori was only a few feet away.

Cathy and Robbie Andreozzi, Tori’s mother and brother, console each other in court in July 2004. The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

Tori’s father, Robert, struggled to speak, and begged the judge to impose a lengthy sentence. Cathy Andreozzi told the judge about all they’d lost. Tori would never fall in love, get married, have a child. Instead of hearing music and laughter coming from Tori’s room, there was only the sound of the suction machine, and crying.

Malcolm Brownell, Marilyn’s husband, started yelling “That’s not true!” when the judge talked about Marilyn Brownell’s drinking. The judge had him thrown out.

Brownell’s lawyer, Scott Lutes, argued for leniency, saying that other drunken-driving cases hadn’t resulted in serious jail time. He said all of Tori’s needs would be taken care of by a lawsuit settlement that had been reached that day. He said the Andreozzis had asked for $39.3 million; Brownell and BMW Financial Services, which leased her the car, had offered $25 million.

The judge was taken aback. “I said, ‘If you’re suggesting that any amount of money could make this right …,” Nugent said recently.

When Brownell spoke, she cried, saying that she didn’t remember anything about the accident and she prayed for a miracle to heal Tori.

Defendant Marilyn Brownell, at Kent County Court House in 2004, fights the tears. She was sentenced to serve 10 years. The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

Nugent was unmoved.

“Listening to the defendant, and her husband causing a commotion, and her lawyer arguing that there was plenty of insurance money, it was just — I don’t know if you can call it callousness, lack of remorse or responsibility,” Nugent said recently. “And then, frankly, to have the [Andreozzis] have to hear that, it was upsetting.”He said in weighing sentencing he took everything into consideration: the crash investigation, the families, the suspect and the girl. It bothered him that Brownell had no explanation for what she had done. He noticed an undercurrent in letters from Brownell’s supporters, who said she was educated, successful, and didn’t deserve to go to prison with “those other bad people.” He’d heard no remorse from Brownell, except for herself.

He thought about Tori, run down and left in the road. The prosecutor, Maureen Keough, had played a video showing Tori before and after the accident: a 12-year-old karate star, arms wind-milling and legs high-kicking, and then afterward, her face slack and eyes dull, unable to communicate with her parents or brother as they stroked her arms and kissed her.

Tori, Nugent thought, is serving a life sentence.

He issued the maximum sentence –– 10 years in prison. After getting out, Brownell would have no driver’s license for five years and would have to perform 1,000 hours of community service. “You made your choice, Mrs. Brownell,” Nugent told her, “and it’s time to face the consequences.”

THERE IS nothing so plentiful in jail as time.

Brownell hadn’t believed she’d be in jail so long. “I didn’t have any indications of what the punishments were,” she said. “In my heart, I know it wasn’t an intentional act. It was an act of negligence.”

She said she was depressed because the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had slowed her business, and the war in Iraq had just begun. She was upset by her parents’ failing health, and found the month of March dark and depressing.

Brownell blames depression for her drinking and drug use. She said she used marijuana until age 30 and later became addicted to Vicodin, the narcotic pain medication. After kicking that addiction, she began relying on alcohol. She said she had stopped drinking 15 months before the crash, although clerks at local liquor stores told the police that she was a frequent customer.

Even now, Brownell is foggy about her drinking before the crash and says the day was a complete blackout.

Brownell still bristles about Nugent calling her a drunk and saying she’d been “on a bender.” “I’m not the town drunk of West Warwick,” she said. “You can’t be the town drunk and have a corporation.”

She has taken every class at the ACI –– from courses in spirituality and psychotherapy to ones in basic computer courses. She tutored other inmates, volunteered in the prison library, sewed dolls for charity, took art and drama classes. So far, the classes have helped Brownell earn 18 days off her sentence for good behavior.

She’s been enrolled in rehab programs since she arrived. Sometimes, she says she’s an addict, and other times she calls herself an abuser suffering from mental illness. “I’m addicted to altering my consciousness,” she says.

Brownell said she is comforted by friends and her husband of 23 years, who calls and visits her every day. “I found out I had a lot more friends than I knew. It really helped me to heal,” Brownell said. “It helped me to gain some strength to do the prison time.”

She was denied parole in November. She said she’d gotten 50 letters of support, of which her lawyer sent 22 to the parole board. But the parole board found that “to parole Ms. Brownell would depreciate the serious nature of the crime,” and noted opposition from the attorney general’s office, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the community. Her next hearing is November 2010.

Brownell wants to tell her own story. “If I could trade my life for Tori, I’d give my life, but I can’t do that,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do, so … I need to do something pro-active. I need to reach out, whatever I can do to educate. It’s not just underage drinkers. It’s not just people coming home from the bars having fun. It could be someone such as myself with a mental illness, addiction and attempted suicide.”

She has written to MADD in Texas, offering help planning events. She talks about writing a book or giving speeches at high schools and community events.

“I feel I have a voice, a way of speaking, so if there was a community release,” Brownell said. “I’m not saying I don’t deserve punishment for my crime. I’m just saying I could be more pro-active.”

But she has never contacted the Andreozzis. She said she wanted to, but her lawyer and others advised against it.

Now, she said, she doesn’t want to intrude on Tori’s mother. “I don’t want to hurt her anymore than I have. I don’t know if she wants to hear from me,” Brownell said. “Maybe, there’ll be a day I’ll get that message.”

ON THE FIFTH anniversary of the crash, Cathy Andreozzi visited the Cowesett Avenue fire station to thank the firefighters for helping save her daughter’s life.

A few days later, Andreozzi re-read the journal she kept the first year after the crash. The entry on the one-year anniversary ended this way: “And so, one year later, we still wait. We wait for that moment, that breakthrough, that possibility that time does make a difference.”

She started to cry. Five years later, she said, and I could write the same thing.

She holds on to the words of a doctor who’d backed the family’s decision not to institutionalize Tori. Mark my words, he said, in four years, you will see a difference in her. I’ve seen incredible things when a patient is surrounded by family and love and intense rehabilitation.

Tori spends every weekday in intensive therapy at Sargent Rehabilitation Center and continues with therapy at home. “Tori is very, very lucky to be part of this group [at Sargent],” Andreozzi said. “She’s stimulated, and cared for, and loved. It’s family.”

The former karate champion is challenged with living. Respiratory illnesses threaten her life. She’s unable to cough or swallow her own saliva; her caregiver frequently suctions her mouth.

Tori is a quadriplegic, and without mobility, her muscles will atrophy and her spine curve from osteoporosis, her mother said. At home, Tori uses a Quadrasizer exercise machine that improves her range of motion. She has Reiki holistic therapy and reflexology. She listens to classical music during the day to stimulate her mind, and lullabies at night to soothe her to sleep.

Speech therapist Kristine Salley works with Tori on a regular basis. “Tori’s eye gaze is so wonderful,” she says, something that is often compromised in a head injury. The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

Her prognosis is unknown, but there has been subtle improvement. Tori’s tongue has begun to move when she makes sounds, which leads to the possibility of forming words. “Tori’s eye gaze is so wonderful,” said speech therapist Kristine Salley, as she held up a mirror for Tori, who seems to enjoy looking at faces. “Oftentimes, after a head injury, it’s not there, but Tori has it.”

In January 2006, as her occupational therapist was goofing around with her, Tori laughed for the first time since the crash. A month later, while shopping in TJ Maxx, Andreozzi heard Tori give a little “heh-heh.” The mother began crying amid the racks of clothes.

Tori’s occupational therapist is trying to teach her to lean her face against a sensor to turn on a lighted dolphin mobile. Tori may realize she can turn on other things — lights, the radio, the TV.

“Maybe someday we can bake together. She could turn on the mixer,” Andreozzi says. “It was a mother-daughter thing we loved to do together.”

There are reminders of what could have been. Tori would have graduated from West Warwick High School in June. The 2008 yearbook will include a photo of her in a dress from Forever 21 –– propped up from behind by her caregiver. Last year, Andreozzi wheeled Tori to the MAC makeup counter at Warwick Mall, so her daughter could have the makeover she’d begged for at 12. Her commemorative black-belt hangs off her wheelchair.

The family has moved from West Warwick to Narragansett, and the Andreozzis have since divorced. Robbie, now 19, is traveling for karate competitions and is still haunted by memories of the crash.

The family has tried to preserve Tori’s compassionate spirit by setting up a foundation in her name. The Tori Lynn Andreozzi Foundation supports law enforcement, education about substance abuse, pediatric traumatic brain injury and also raises money for youths in sports competitions. It is hosting a dinner-dance at Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet on May 2 to benefit MADD RI.

“Part of me says until you get to the reason why people drink, you will never, ever be able to erase the problem,” Andreozzi said. “There are people with a sense of invincibility, an irresponsibility to others. There are people who truly have problems with alcohol. And there are those who just don’t think.”

She doesn’t believe there is any length of sentence that can equal the pain caused by drunken driving, but she hopes that longer, harsher sentences are a deterrent.

“There has to be something that makes it incredibly significant, life-altering, and a way to do that is time,” she said. “Maybe it takes some longer than others. Maybe some serve 10 years and don’t get it. Maybe some get it on day one.”

IT WILL BE four years in July since Judge Nugent sentenced Brownell. He still thinks about both Marilyn and Tori, he said last month, sitting in a conference room with Brownell’s thick case file at his elbow.

“When you have to sentence somebody and put them in jail, you wonder, frankly, how they’re doing in prison and whether it’s had an effect on them, changed their thinking, their responsibility,” Nugent said. “And you think about the victims. You think about fate.”

He saw the photo of Tori in The Journal in December, immobile in her wheelchair, and it made him remember the video of Tori before the crash. He wonders if Brownell has realized she has a drinking problem.

He said he hopes that the prospect of jail is deterring people from drinking and driving. But with roadside memorials marking every latest drunken-driving tragedy, he wonders.

He does not think that Brownell’s sentence was too harsh. “I don’t think 10 years is a lot of time,” he said, “when you look at the result of what happened to Tori Lynn Andreozzi.”

amilkovi@projo.com