North Dakota passed legislation to strengthen DUI penalties in 2013. The deadly 2015 DUI crash you are about to learn about would be the precedent-setting case testing the mettle of the law. Three young women—two of them University of North Dakota students on summer break—met up for a night of fun. What they got was a parent’s worst nightmare.

We will also explore why North Dakota and other sparsely populated midwestern states have some of the highest DUI numbers per capita in America—and why that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.