Students and Parents Witness Sobering Outcome of Drunken-Driving

A couple of smashed-up cars, bloodied-and-bandaged teens and shattered glass littered the stadium at San Ramon Valley High School Thursday. On Friday, hundreds of students were brought to tears during a memorial service for teens involved in the crash.

Though harrowing, the crash scene was fake—part of the national anti-DUI "Every 15 Minutes" campaign. The campaign gets its name because at the nonprofit program's inception in the 1990s, someone in the United States died every 15 minutes in an alcohol-related wreck. Today, it's every 30 minutes, according to the nonprofit.

The staged tragedy aims to scare students out of driving while drunk or high. Leadership students acted out the scene, starting with the moments after the imagined accident. The student-actors groaned in pain, one of them suffering from a broken leg, another dead upon impact and yet another whose neck broke.

Minutes later, the paramedics showed up with a couple of motorcycle cops and squad cars—lights flaring, sirens screaming. The emergency responders went through the motions of an actual wreck.

Firefighters powered up "jaws of life" to cut away car doors and carry out bodies on gurneys. Paramedics clamped on neck braces, tied on tourniquets and checked pulses. A helicopter landed in the school's baseball field to carry away one person to John Muir hospital, and a deputy from the Contra Costa County Coroner's Office carted away one of the two fatalities in a body bag.

The 30-minute sketch ended with cops arresting one of the drivers on suspicion of manslaughter and driving under the influence. The cops and the student-actor went so far as to film the journey to the Martinez detention facility, where the driver was fingerprinted, photographed and stripped of civilian clothes.

It was an elaborate live-action cautionary tale, paid for by school fund-raising, that elicited sharp emotions from some students, especially at the memorial service Friday that easily brought hundreds of students to tears.

"It made me kind of step back to see how people are affected by this kind of behavior," noted 14-year-old, Matt Mulholland.

Sometimes, it's easy to dismiss the outcome of drinking and driving because the thought is that "it's the kind of thing that happens to other people," some students said.

"That's why I thought it was neat, in a bad way, to see what would actually happen if people drink and drive," said Katie Baker, 16. "It was intense."

During the mock funeral parents read obituaries for children who "died" in the crash. The ceremony had all the trappings of a real funeral— bagpipes, black-clad mourners, slideshows and crying families.

Later, an assembly of more than 2,000 parents, students and teachers crowded St. Isidore's gym as the crash scene's student actors talked about the exprience of dying without saying good-bye.

Though Thursday's tragedies were imagined, emotions were very real Friday. Choked up "victims" from the crash read letters to their surviving siblings. Music played during a slideshow that showed the "living dead" students smiling, attractive, athletic and alive with their birth and faked-death dates below the portraits.

And then reality hit. Two parents whose children died in alcohol-related car wrecks walked up and shared their stories. As they spoke, sobs filled the otherwise quiet auditorium.

"You're the lucky ones because your loved ones are still here," said Bob Pack, whose two young children died six years ago when a driver loaded on prescription narcotics and booze careened off Camino Tassajara, slamming into Pack's kids. "But that hurt, that tightening of the stomach—I feel that every day."