An Oamaru woman who says her "totally intoxicated" 16-year-old son lay on the side of a road for two hours 100m from home feels "let down".
The woman, who does not want to be named, said she decided to speak out following the death of King's College, Auckland, pupil James Webster (16), who died after drinking a bottle of vodka and falling into a coma.
The woman's son had attended a party in Oamaru last month to farewell some friends.
Earlier that night, he had been at a family gathering and had "a couple of beers". He was very sports-oriented and did not usually drink, she said.
She told him to be home by midnight and to get a taxi.
"I had no worries of him doing the wrong thing that night."
The woman woke at 1.30am to find two police officers at her house - "my heart just sank" - and they had just picked her son up from the side of the road.
They told her to sit with him all night in case he choked on his vomit.
She later established that he got a taxi shortly after 11pm and had vomited in the car.
Although the taxi driver said the youth wanted out and the woman said she was disgusted with him vomiting in the car, she said there were "so many ifs" and she was grateful nothing happened to him. It was "freezing" that night, and he could have been run over.
She questioned why the taxi driver, who made the choice to pick him up, could not have "gone that little bit further" for a 16-year-old whose actions were "really out of character", or why the driver did not get her.
"You just look outside the square sometimes. There has to be another way of dealing with this. I just felt let down.
"Thank God nothing happened," she said.
She was also annoyed that his friends did not contact her. If she had known he was going to be drinking, she would have dropped him off and picked him up.
"I don't want this to ever happen again to anybody," she said.
Murray Bell, from Whitestone Taxis, said when contacted the youth got to where he wanted to be and the company had no rights to do anything with him.
Drivers, for their safety, were instructed not to go knocking on doors of darkened houses at any time, for any reason.
"We did what we were asked to do, dropped him where he asked to be dropped off, at the end of the drive," Mr Bell said.
The boy was on his feet when the driver left, at the place where he asked to be let off and GPS showed he was dropped at the end of his driveway. The youth needed to learn something from the incident, he said.
