Deadliest Drunk Driver Freed

Larry Mahoney, the man convicted of killing 27 people in the nation's deadliest drunk driving accident, has been released from jail after serving nine and a half years of a 16-year sentence.

Back in 1988, Mahoney, whose blood alcohol content was nearly three times the legal limit, drove his pickup truck in the wrong direction on an interstate highway, and slammed into a bus that was taking 67 people from a Radcliff, Ky., church back home following an outing to a Cincinnati amusement park.

CBS News Correspondent Cynthia Bowers reports that every day for the last 11 years, Janie Fair has mourned the loss of daughter Shannon.

"There's just a sadness that always comes," she says. "Those of us who have to live with pain everyday, we live with it, whether he's in prison or whether he's out of prison."

Twenty-four children died that night. Katrina Anderson was one of the survivors.

"I remember everything. I have nightmares about the fire and it's hard to breathe," she says.

This accident remains this nation's most deadly drunk driving crash, so horrifying it led to sweeping changes in America's attitudes about alcohol and drunk driving laws.

In fact, by the end of that year, all 50 states had raised the minimum drinking age to 21. And a third have lowered the legal limit for a driver's blood alcohol level to .8%. It seems to have made a difference.

In 1987, the year before the Kentucky crash, more than 23,000 people died in alcohol-related accidents nationwide. Ten years later, that number had dropped by 32 percent to just over 16,000.

Janie Fair, now on the board of Mothers against Drunk Driving, says we still need to do more.

"The death rate has gone down, but if we were losing over 16,000 people a year from plane crashes, there would be a terrible outcry," Fair says.

Mahoney, 46, has joined Alcoholics Anonymous and, as a free man, is entitled to reapply for a driver's license. Katrina Anderson believes he has learned his lesson.

"He's had a lot of reminders. I think that's the worst punishment for him is to have to realize what he did," she says.

The community of Radcliff, Kentucky also has a reminder - a monument bearing the names of Mahoney's victims.