WHEN Majida Jafar was driving home from work on April 20, 2006, she had to detour around a stretch of Kinnelon Road, where police and emergency vehicles had gathered at the scene of a traffic accident. She thought little of it.

But over the next several hours, a parent's nightmare unfolded for Mrs. Jafar and her husband, Bassam Jafar, who live in Kinnelon. Eventually they learned that their 15-year-old daughter, Mayada, and her cousin, Athear Jafar, 16, of Jefferson Township, had been killed by a motorist who was later charged with driving while intoxicated.


That scene has increasingly played out in New Jersey, where the number of accidents involving a legally drunken driver in New Jersey rose markedly in each of the past two years.

The Jafars learned about Mayada the hard way. Mrs. Jafar expected to meet the girls and take them to a movie. They were nowhere to be found, however, and did not answer their cellphones.

A friend of the girls told Mrs. Jafar she had heard a news report that two people -- boys, she thought, but maybe girls -- had been hurt in an accident on Kinnelon Road, where the girls might have been walking had they set out for the theater on foot. ''I had the clue then that it was my daughter,'' Mrs. Jafar said. Frantic, she and her husband drove to the accident scene.

The police kept them away, but, she said, she saw the confirmation of her worst fear on one officer's face. ''I saw one of them blink in a certain way, and I knew, it's both of them, and they died,'' she said. She was right; a car had struck the girls, the police said, and its driver's blood-alcohol level registered nearly four times the legal limit.

Since that day, Mrs. Jafar has appeared with a picture of her daughter at every court appearance for the driver, Eugene C. Baum Jr., 46, of Dover. Mr. Baum, who has claimed insanity, has not yet been to trial on charges of two counts of first-degree aggravated manslaughter and two counts of second-degree death by automobile.

''I want to be there for justice,'' Mrs. Jafar said. ''I want to stop these drunken drivers.''

A total of 224 people died in accidents involving a legally drunken driver in New Jersey in 2006, up from 203 in 2005 and the highest number since 2000, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. While drunken-driving fatalities held constant nationwide, it was the second year in a row that New Jersey's drunken-driving fatalities had risen -- there were 185 in 2004 -- but state officials said they could not explain why.

''We'd love to know the answers ourselves,'' said Capt. Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Police. ''I don't know if it's a blip on the radar screen or something else.''

Fatalities in New York State have declined in each of the last two years. In Connecticut, they went down in 2005 and up in 2006.

Experts say a two-year trend of increasing deaths involving drunken drivers is cause for concern.

''Over the last two decades, the number of alcohol-related deaths has been cut in half,'' said Ralph W. Hingson, the director of the Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. ''In the context of that, a two-year increase is worrisome.''

Dr. Hingson said research had shown that alcohol-related accidents are sensitive to public-awareness campaigns and to the intensity of enforcement efforts, including sobriety checkpoints.

But New Jersey officials said that the state and private groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been operating public awareness campaigns with the same intensity as in past years and that enforcement efforts have not lapsed.