Cara Lee’s parents can only hope she never saw the truck that killed her. Witnesses said the Toyota Tundra was going 70 mph when it ran a red light and slammed into the car she was in, embedding its license plate into the frame near where she was sitting.

Police declared Cara dead the moment they arrived at the scene. Later, when they found the driver of the truck hiding in some nearby apartments, they saw that his gums were bleeding from the force of the crash.

He also was drunk.

Cara’s parents have shared their story again and again as ambassadors for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, reliving the worst moments of their lives in the hope that it will save others from going through what they have.

“I look at my life as being over without her,” said her mother, Jackie Lee.

Around 20 people will die on California roads in the next few days in crashes that involve alcohol, if statistics from past New Year’s holidays are a guide; close to 400 more will be injured. The holiday of champagne and midnight toasts also is the most consistently deadly holiday in California for alcohol-involved crashes.

As Jackie and Randy Lee of Santa Ana say now when they talk about Cara’s death: It’s all because someone wanted to drive and didn’t think it could be his mother in the other car, his brother, his daughter. “You live your life around your children,” Randy Lee said. “There’s just us now.”

‘Mom, I love you’

Cara was their only child, 20 years old, still living at home in Santa Ana, still leaving little notes around the house for her parents. “Good morning, Mom, I love you.” “Have a good day Daddy.” Her mother still has a piece of paper that Cara slipped under the bedroom door when she was very little and hurt her finger: “An update on Cara’s index finger. It still hurts.”

Cara worked as a recreation leader for the city of Newport Beach, and the children adored her. She was studying part-time and wanted to work with autistic kids. Her good looks and bright smile won her car-modeling contracts on the side and a spot in a music video.

“She was just a happy-go-lucky little girl,” said her father, who called her Pumpkin. “She just took you at face value,” said her mother, who called her Baby Girl.

Cara went with friends to a Chinese New Year celebration in February 2010. Her parents didn’t wait up; they knew the hum of the garage door would wake them up when she got home. Instead, a knock on the door shook them out of bed around 6:30 a.m.

Randy Lee shouted down the stairs: “Who is it?”

“Sheriff’s Department.”

The parents opened the door to a deputy and a deputy coroner, who asked them to sit down. “Cara was at a party …,” the deputy coroner began.

Jackie cut her off: “A family Chinese New Year’s party.”

“She’s dead,” the deputy coroner blurted out, according to the parents.

Jackie yelled at them to get out. Randy sat for a few stunned minutes and then began calling family. “There’s been an accident …” Later, he had to go collect his daughter’s belongings – her cellphone, keys. He looked for a heart pendant that she always wore, but nobody could find it in the wreckage of the car.

Then Randy went to the accident site, on Flower Street in south Santa Ana. “That’s where her last breath was,” he remembers thinking.

The driver of the truck that killed her, Gustavo Vega, 22, a fellow student at Orange Coast College, had been fleeing an earlier fender-bender when he ran a red light and broadsided the car she was in. Witnesses reported seeing no brake lights before the collision, which crushed Cara’s passenger seat into the center of the car.

Not first DUI arrest

Police found Vega hiding in a nearby apartment complex. He smelled of alcohol and told an officer he thought he was in Garden Grove. He was found to have a blood-alcohol level of 0.17 percent, more than twice the legal limit.

It wasn’t Vega’s first DUI arrest. A few years earlier, he had decided to cruise around Santa Ana one night while drinking from a bottle of vodka. He was arrested after he crashed into a fire hydrant; a judge gave him probation and ordered him to write an essay about drunken driving.

He wrote about the embarrassment of the arrest, about how he felt “extremely uncomfortable” in the handcuffs. “I felt so much regret, and I made a vow to myself never to drink and drive,” he wrote.

He was charged with second-degree murder after Cara’s death. A jury convicted him last year, and a judge sent him to prison for 20 years to life. He has filed an appeal.

“I wake up sick every day,” Jackie Lee said. “I am sick to my stomach every day because of this.”

After the crash, Cara’s parents tormented themselves with the what-ifs. What if Cara had been in a different car? What if she had left the party just a second later than she did? What if Vega had just called a cab?

Jackie spent months inside, on the couch, unable to face a day without her daughter. She had surgery not long ago and says she prayed that she would not wake up. Randy still tries to avoid driving through the intersection where his daughter died.

They’re planning to move to Hawaii, to get away from the reminders of Cara’s death.

Cara would have turned 23 this year. Instead, on the 14th of every month, Jackie marks another month since she last found one of Cara’s notes waiting for her in the morning. There have been 34 of those occasions; next month will be 35.

“It’s another day for her not to be around,” Jackie said. “To not hear her say, ‘Hi mom, I love you.’ To not go pinch her.”