enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Perl Cowley, of Biddeford, looks at a photo of her daughter, Sarah, who was killed in a single car accident a year ago.

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"Sometimes you're just left without much of an option," the 22-year-old said in a January 2002 Maine Sunday Telegram article about people who drive illegally. "It's just a chance you take."

On Dec. 27, 2006, Cowley took the chance again. This time, the result was tragic. While driving alone through rural Dayton at night, Cowley, then 27, lost control of her mother's Ford Taurus station wagon, crashed into a tree and was killed. Police say she had been drinking heavily, she was probably speeding, and her license to drive was suspended.

When a suspended driver causes a crash that kills a random motorist, it's front-page news. But Cowley's crash is more typical: Of the 65 people killed statewide in accidents involving suspended drivers from 2003 to 2006, more than half had been drinking alcohol before the crash and 33 of those killed were the suspended drivers themselves.

"That happens a lot, unfortunately," said Carl Hallman of the Maine Bureau of Highway Safety. "You get the single-vehicle crash, speed-related, and you come to find out the subject has a suspended driver's license."

And yet, as much as Cowley's death illuminates broader trends, it hardly provides a full picture of who she was.

Cowley's mother, Perl, agreed recently to speak publicly about her daughter for the first time. What emerged from that interview and others, plus a review of court records, is a portrait of an intelligent and compassionate young woman who never escaped her demons.

A SMART KID

Sarah Cowley was born in Santa Rosa, Calif., to Perl Cowley and her husband, Michael, and was the older of two daughters. The family didn't stay long in Santa Rosa, or anywhere else. During Sarah's childhood, her family lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Bakersfield, Vermont and, eventually, the Virgin Islands, where she attended the prestigious Antilles School.

Her mother, who now lives in Biddeford, remembers Sarah as a smart kid who spoke her mind.

"She's always been very opinionated," Perl Cowley said. "She wouldn't be suppressed."

As a teenager during the 1990s, Cowley dropped out of high school and followed her father, who had separated from her mom, to Maine.

After earning her general equivalency diploma, Cowley found work as a bartender and a house painter, her mother said. She also earned a pilot's license and taught herself to become a gourmet cook.

"She was brilliant," said Rick Martin, a family friend. "Whatever she wanted to put her mind to, she made happen."

Cowley's dream was to open her own catering business, according to her mother. She wanted to call it "Small Mart" and open it across from the Wal-Mart on Route 111 in Biddeford.

"She'd go to the spice rack and she'd experiment," Perl Cowley said. "She liked to cook, and she was real good at it."

COPING WITH LOSS

In 2001, Michael Cowley died in Portland at age 54. According to his widow, he drank himself to death.

Sarah Cowley took her father's death hard.

"It's like her compass was gone," Martin said.

The same year, after a string of speeding tickets, Cowley's Maine driver's license was suspended for two weeks. Three days into the suspension, she was pulled over for operating without a seat belt. She was eventually convicted of driving after suspension and ordered to pay a $150 fine.

"Two weeks isn't terrible," she said in the 2002 interview. "It just didn't work well for me."

A few months after her first conviction for driving with a suspended license, Cowley was again caught driving without a valid license, which had been suspended for two months as a result of a prior conviction. She was fined $250.

In the following years, Cowley earned additional license suspensions for failing to appear in court, failing to pay fines and failing to file proof of insurance with the state, which is often required for motorists with bad driving...