The impact of the crash threw him into Neil’s lap. That car struck the passenger side of Neil’s car, where Dingley was sitting with all the booze. “The next thing I knew a pair of headlights appeared at the crest of the hill and was bearing down on us - a white Volkswagen driven by an eighteen-year-old girl. Neil said his car lost its grip on the asphalt and he began sliding sideways while another car began drifting into the oncoming lane. My blood level would later test at nearly twice the legal limit," Neil wrote. “According to a police report, I swerved to avoid a parked fire truck. He said a wet fog leaves the streets “slick during most evenings,” which led to his tires breaking their grip on the wet pavement, as he claimed in his book. It was dark out by then, Neil explained in his book, and as he rounded a curve leading to a hill, he downshifted. “We were driving along, chatting about this and that, two long-haired guys out on a booze run, me in my customary Hawaiian shirt and shorts, Razzle in his high-tops, leather jeans, and frilly shirt," he wrote. Because the car didn’t have a backseat, Razzle was holding all the alcohol in his lap. So, he and Dingley got into the car and they made it to the liquor store safely where they bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of alcohol before heading back to Neil’s house. “I’d been driving drunk for about as long as I’d been driving. “We’d drive the four blocks to the store, get some supplies, be back home in a flash,” he wrote. He claimed he didn’t see a problem with his state of mind. He had just bought a new car, a bright red vintage ‘72 Ford De Tomaso Pantera, which he was excited to drive. “I could have walked there, but I’d been partying for three straight days, you know - walking there was out of the question, too much reality to deal with, if you know what I mean,” Neil wrote. So, around dusk, Dingley and Neil decided to go for a booze run to the liquor store, located just four blocks away. During the third day, despite the “seemingly never-dwindling pile of coke,” they ran out of alcohol. On December 8, Neil was having a party with some friends in the apartment, a party he wrote lasted for days. In Neil’s 2010 book, “Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen,” he described the incident. He only served 15 days of his 30 day sentence. Two years after the crash, Neil was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 200 hours of community service, and to pay $2.6 million in restitution to the victims of the crash. Neil’s blood alcohol level was 0.17, well above the limit. Vince Neil, Mötley Crüe’s lead vocalist, has been arrested and convicted of multiple crimes, but none as tragic as his manslaughter conviction for killing his friend Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley, drummer of the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks, in a drunk driving accident in 1984. This shocking and sad aspect of Mötley Crüe's story is chronicled in “The Dirt,” the biographical drama film about them which began streaming earlier this year on Netflix. Mötley Crüe is one of the most iconic metal bands of all time, but the band's path toward fame wasn't always an easy one - there was some extremely dark moments during their rock days, including when the lead singer accidentally killed someone.
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