Amber Leone Murphy knows it's largely luck separating her happy story from the tragic tales of Christina Lee Hauser and Marie Ellen Ahmann.
Hauser and Ahmann, both young women of promise, died in January in separate car crashes resulting from the same devastating culprit: alcohol.
Ahmann, a popular 21-year-old finance major at Winona State University, plunged down a 40-foot embankment into the Mississippi River. The Woodbury native had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit.
The 36-year-old Hauser, of Winona, missed a curve and drove an SUV into the Mississippi River, killing herself and three male passengers, all under age 30. Married and the doting mother of a son she, too, had twice the legal limit of alcohol in her blood.
Murphy, of Blaine, isn't about to point a finger. An alcoholic for 10 years beginning at age 13, she recalls "pretending to be a sober cab" for friends, her liquor hidden inside a child's sippy cup placed in her center console.
"People are baffled as to how they got behind the wheel," Murphy said. "But the first thing to go when drinking is judgment."
She blacked out at 14, body-boarded drunk during a major storm at 19 and was raped at 20 after a party.
Things are far sunnier for Murphy, 32, since she got sober eight years ago. She founded a business, began a full-time administrative job with a health care company and became a sought-after inspirational speaker at treatment centers where women struggle not just with alcohol abuse, but addictions to Adderall, incense and many other substances.