The Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday revoked the licenses of three people convicted of killing or injuring someone while driving drunk after a Reno Gazette-Journal investigation found that they had been allowed to drive too soon.

The DMV also extended the amount of time that five other drunken driving offenders will be without driver’s licenses so that their revocation period complies with the law, DMV spokesman Tom Jacobs said.

Cecelia Pearson, who was 14 when Merri Noel Aldis drove drunk and smashed into a car carrying Pearson and two friends, praised the agency’s decision to take licenses from Aldis, Marissa Herold and Scott Sherman.

Pearson, now 18 and in college in Ohio, suffered a fractured pelvis, collapsed lung and broken wrist in the Sept. 4, 2005, crash on Double R Boulevard. She said she continued to have flashbacks and was afraid to be on the road long after the accident.

“It’s like with anything, like with children, when you give them a punishment, unless you follow it all the way through, it won’t be a lesson learned,” she said. “Maybe this time, it will help her understand the seriousness of it.”

Messages left for Aldis, 47, were not immediately returned.

The Gazette-Journal investigation found that at least nine of the 113 people convicted of DUI causing death or substantial bodily harm since 2000 had a license despite a 1997 law prohibiting them from driving for three years after being released from prison.

Some were revoked for only 90 days and others for one year.

The DMV blamed some of the mix-ups on the courts, saying that they had not received notice of the convictions. In other cases, the DMV said the Department of Corrections and the Division of Parole and Probation had not updated the offender’s status.

Following the Gazette-Journal story on Jan. 17, the DMV sought advice from the Nevada attorney general on whether to revoke licenses in the cases where mistakes were made, Jacobs said.

The agency was told to take the licenses, he said.

The DMV had taken similar action in 2005, when Stop DUI, a victim’s advocacy group in Las Vegas, found that a drunken driving offender there had been issued a license only four days after being released from prison.

Continued