Cop Who Nabbed 4K Drunk Drivers May Have Lost Daughter to One

Dan Shragal of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has made almost 4,000 DUI arrests during his career, but one suspected drunk driver he couldn't stop will probably haunt him for the rest of his life. Shragal, 48, was working a DUI checkpoint on Aug. 22 when his phone rang: It was the mother of his daughter, Kirstin Burton, 22. "Through the sobbing and the screaming she got out that Kirstin was dead," Shragal tells WXIN. While driving in Dayton, Ohio, Burton's car was hit by a pickup truck driven by a possible drunk driver and crashed into a tree, reports People. Burton's 14-month-old son, Orion, also in the car, was critically injured with a cracked skull and broken arm. "When we got to the hospital, they still could not tell us if he was going to live because the amount of blood that he lost," Shragal says.

Orion is now recovering in the company of his dad, Burton's husband Andrew, according to a GoFundMe page. No arrests have been made in the case; police only say the truck driver is "being investigated as a possible drunk driver." Though Shragal worries how he'll keep his emotions in check, he says he wants to get back to his DUI work as soon as possible. "I don't want to have another father bury his daughter or his son or children to lose a mom or a dad," he says. Still, he manages to take comfort in the last words he spoke to Burton—"I love you, sunshine," to which she replied, "I love you too, Daddy"—and the last words she shared with the world. "Try to impact people's lives," she said in a Periscope video posted hours before her death. "Because you never know when and if someone might need it." (Police say this man was killed by a drunk driver while heading to an AA meeting.)