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Accident Survivors Drive Home Their Point About SafetyBy Amy Halloran “The egg men always wear seat belts so that they won’t fall out and get broken. Do you?” Richard Scarry asks readers in his classic picture book “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.” This quotation comes from a page that shows a big pileup. The egg truck is at the bottom of the picture, but only the eggs are broken, not the egg men. Scarry has raised a few generations of readers. His pages are blueprints kids use to understand the architecture of the world around them. I wish these blueprints were also handy for young adults. But even the instructional videos used in prelicensing and driver’s ed courses that show automobile accidents in vivid detail can’t always convince teenagers that they are not invincible. I’ve met two people recently who speak at schools and are trying to cure that adolescent tendency. Both of these men were in car crashes as teenagers and suffered revisions of their basic abilities and life plans as a result. Both are intent now to get the word out about vehicular safety. The first man I met was James Peck. He lives in Redmond, Washington, and is friends with my mother- and father-in-law from working out at the YMCA gym. Over lunch on the deck at my in-laws’ house, Peck, who is 36 years old and towers over me even sitting down, told me about his life. “I didn’t wear my seatbelt, and I flew out the back seat of a convertible and hit a tree,” he said. “It shook my head back to front and side to side. It was a closed-head injury. I was in a coma for three and a half months. I was in the hospital for 13 months altogether. Rehab included physical torture, OT and speech therapy.” Peck was finished with therapy by the time he was 25 and now lives in a group home. He uses a walker to get around and also has a motorized scooter that he drives to Starbucks to get coffee. He’s crazy for football and says college basketball and baseball are OK, too. He visits high schools to talk about his experience, but he’s not sure how well he’s understood and wants to get a DVD made to help him tell his story to students. For now, he just uses his voice, and understanding him is a bit of a challenge. Peck tells people that he wanted to be a journalist, but that he figures God saved him for a reason. The kid who was sitting next to him in the convertible died. The kids in the front seat walked away from the accident without checking to see how the back-seat passengers had fared, said Peck, who added that he tries not to think about that. At the schools, he talks about bike safety and encourages kids to wear helmets. He also advocates that everyone follow the seat-belt law, which in Washington state requires that every vehicular passenger wear a seat belt. New York state, where I live, only mandates that kids under the age of 16 wear a seat belt in the back seat; adults in the back seat are free to go unrestrained. In New Jersey, which has similar seat-belt legislation, the governor was injured in an accident in April; he was sitting in the back seat and not wearing a seat belt. The lack of a seat belt was not the only risk involved in the accident James Peck survived. That incident also involved alcohol, and the second school speaker I met has a powerful method to try to separate drinking from driving. Jonathon Mueller is 27 years old and had a traumatic brain injury nine years ago. For the past seven years he has been speaking to students at high schools, at MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) conferences, and to other groups about his life and what changed it. “What I ask all these students to do,” Mueller said recently at the Independent Living Center of the Hudson Valley, “is pledge to me that ‘I will never drink and drive. I promise never to get in a car with a driver who has been drinking. I promise to do my best to prevent someone who has been drinking from driving.’ “The students giggle at first when they stand up,” Mueller said. “But when they make the pledge, you can see their hearts stop.” The pledge is a part of a presentation that includes a video of Mueller’s life from when he was a baby through his teenage years. Students see Jonathon growing up as a normal kid and teenager, and they watch him running competitively. A song written and sung by Mueller’s father accompanies the compilation of home movies, and the video helps kids see how Mueller’s life compares to theirs. Following this segment of the program, audiences – some composed of up to 500 people – watch a film produced by the Dutchess County DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). The district attorney and sheriff discuss penal codes for drunken driving, and viewers see a man jailed for killing an underage drinker: a passenger in his car whom he supplied with alcohol. Mueller’s case is also featured in this film, and people learn that the drunken man who hit Mueller’s SAAB with his pickup truck died instantly. Mueller was going to get Chinese food with friends at dinnertime; the kind of car he was driving probably saved his life. He was attending SUNY (State University of New York) Cobleskill and studying math, science and phys ed. He didn’t know if he wanted to be an ornithologist, a math teacher or a phys ed teacher. Now his goal is to stop DWI and DUI. Mueller lives in an apartment complex with six other people with traumatic brain injuries. One of the survivors has overnight staff available that others can contact in case of emergency, and Mueller has workers help him throughout the day. He relies upon a day planner and a white erase board to remind him what is happening, because his short-term memory is very poor. That has improved with time and repetition. Mueller uses a private section of his journal to keep track of what he’s discussed with his girlfriend. Meeting Mueller and Peck and hearing them tell their stories has been a compelling experience for me. When I returned home from meeting Peck, I upgraded my 4-year-old’s car seat to a safer, more secure model. I have another son, too, a 9-year-old, and I am a bit panicked now about the idea of my sons growing up and getting on the road. I am, however, happy to know that Mueller and Peck, and others like them, are making it their mission to guide kids to better choices in cars. Amy Halloran is a writer who lives in upstate New York with her sons and husband. |
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