"Nothing went our way": A KY mother's fight for justice after drunk driver killed her son

Four and a half years after Joseph Siami killed Chase Lawson, a Jefferson County judge gave him six months in jail and probation. His family calls it a failure of justice from the very first night.

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Susan Lawson doesn't sleep well when her kids aren't home.

It was that restlessness- a mother's instinct- that first told her something was wrong in the early hours of November 2021. She'd woken up around 2:30 a.m., noticed her son Chase wasn't back yet, checked his phone location, and saw he was somewhere on La Grange Road. Probably heading home, she thought. She dozed back off.

By 3 a.m., his location showed University of Louisville Hospital.

She woke her husband. They called the ER. A hospital employee told them three people had been brought in from a crash site. Susan texted Chase and pinged his Apple Watch- the hospital wanted to confirm it was him. It came back. It was him. Critical condition. Come immediately.

"We headed down to University Hospital," Susan told me. "He was in surgery."

A chaplain met them in the waiting room. The surgeon came out shortly after. Chase had been wearing his seatbelt, but the impact had been so violent that the belt tore through his midsection, causing catastrophic internal damage. He was bleeding out.

"He probably had a one to two percent chance to make it through the night," Susan said. "He had coded, I think, twice during surgery."

They called Chase's oldest sister, Chelsea- then doing her medical residency in Denver- and she and her husband got on the next available flight home. His other sister, Hayley, was already there. The family gathered in recovery, Hayley needing to be tended to by hospital staff, Chelsea saying goodbye over FaceTime as her medical training forced her to understand what the injuries meant.

Chase died at U of L Hospital that night. He was 20 years old.

The boy they lost

Chase Lawson grew up in Crestwood, the youngest of three children and the only son. He graduated from South Oldham High School with a 4.0 GPA and broke a school record in the 300-meter hurdles that had stood for nearly 20 years. He was a Governor Scholar. He had dreamed of walking onto the University of Kentucky track team.

When COVID derailed his senior track season- canceling the meets where he'd planned to hit the times he needed- he pivoted. He went to UK, made the men's club volleyball team, and threw himself into a new dream. He was a neuroscience major in the Honors College, doing research with a professor in Lexington, working as a pharmacy tech at the Walmart in Crestwood to build his resume for medical school. His older sister, Chelsea was a physician. He wanted to follow her.

"He kind of knew what Chelsea had to do to get into med school, and so he was working really hard on that," Susan said. "He was very, very driven. He knew what he had to do."

He was home for Thanksgiving break when he died. He and his childhood best friend Nathan had spent Black Friday shopping at the outlet mall together, as was their tradition. That evening, Nathan called and invited Chase to meet some of his college teammates for a night out. Chase said yes.

On the way home, on La Grange Road near the North Hurstbourne Parkway ramp, a BMW hit their Honda head-on.

97 miles per hour. A 45 mile per hour road.

The driver of that BMW was Joseph Williams Siami, then 28 years old.

According to the police report from that night, Siami told the responding officer he had consumed three alcoholic beverages. He had glassy, bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. He failed all three field sobriety tests- the horizontal gaze nystagmus test, the walk-and-turn, and the one-legged stance. A breathalyzer at the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections registered a blood alcohol level of .137- well above the legal limit of .08.

Miranda and Nathan, seated in the front of the Honda, were badly hurt. Nathan suffered a broken back, a fractured ankle, and a lacerated spleen. Miranda sustained broken wrists, a mild brain injury, and a back fracture. Both survived. Chase, in the back seat, did not.

The black box from Siami's BMW would later reveal something that, according to the family, explained everything: at the moment of impact, Siami was traveling at approximately 97 miles per hour, on a 45 mph road. He had barely touched his brakes- until a fraction of a second before the collision, according to the Lawson family.

"I'm truly amazed that all of them didn't die," Susan told me. "He walked away with no injuries."

Only one charge. No jail.

What happened after the crash is, in some ways, its own story.