By Lauren Young
Staff Writer
It may take hours for police to identify your body after a car crash, but it only takes one second to decide not to get behind the wheel.
April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month, and to realistically show young drivers how deadly the consequences can be from drinking alcohol or driving distracted, the Manlius Fire Department held its “Every 15 Minutes” Drinking and Driving Awareness Program at Fayetteville-Manlius this past weekend.
This program – in its fourth year at F-M — was a combined effort between Fayetteville-Manlius High School, Town of Manlius Police Department, Fayetteville Fire Department, Onondaga County Sheriff’s Aviation Unit, University Hospital at Upstate, the Mercy Flight Medical Helicopter and Newell-Fay Funeral Home.
On April 20, 70 pre-selected “living dead” students were removed from their classrooms by a representative of the fire department, police department and school administration. An announcement was made in classes explaining how the removal of students represents one person across the nation who will be involved in a drunk-driving-related incident every 15 minutes.
Students returned to their classrooms “dead,” wearing black shirts and grey face paint and were not permitted to speak to friends, families or teachers for the next 24 hours. Students were monitored to ensure that they didn’t communicate with the “living” in order to generate feelings of loss.
“All of our walking dead…they just represented a minor portion of all the people that will be involved in an alcohol-related incident in a 24-hour period,” said Lieutenant Chris Halliday. “If you multiple that out by a week or a month, or to a year, you can only image the grief and devastation that affects communities, states and even the whole country for all those people that are affected.”
Ominous clouds surrounded two badly-crashed vehicles in the F-M parking lot on April 20, a fitting backdrop to the vibrancy of the fake blood lining the cars’ interiors with glass shards sprayed on the pavement. Approximately 800 students from the junior and senior classes were brought outside to witness the story behind this mock crash involving their classmates.
Accompanied by heavy spurts of hail and sleet, Halliday said that it was “the coldest event that we’ve ever had in doing this program.”
Senior Saarah Vahtola played the drunk driver of the car crash who was texting when she slammed head-on to another car — taking the lives of fellow classmates senior Chris Perry, who played a victim who had crashed his head through the windshield, and junior Sarah Speck, who played a victim discovered dead on arrival. Junior Aidan Welling also played an unconscious victim who was severely injured in the crash.
The Jaws of Life — a rescue apparatus used by first responders to pry open wrecked vehicles — was used to free the trapped student passengers.
While one critically-injured victim was transported via airlift to the hospital, Marissa Mims, the “mother” of junior Sarah Speck, was escorted onto the scene so she could positively identify her daughter’s body.
When Vahtola “failed” her field sobriety test, she was arrested by Officer J.C. Paul. and transported to jail. From there, Vahtola was taken to the Village of Manlius Court where she was filmed in a trial performed by two attorneys and a judge.
Trauma victims Perry and Welling were transported to the SUNY Upstate Medical University Emergency Medicine SIM Lab where doctors and nurses performed an ER scene on camera.
The parents of the “deceased” crash victims, Perry and Speck, gathered for a funeral service at the Newell-Fay funeral home on Cazenovia Road in Manlius. Parents underwent a typical consultation with the funeral director and made decisions for calling hours, flowers, obituaries and picking out a casket.
The remaining 66 “living dead” were taken to the Craftsman Inn where they participated in an overnight retreat to discuss the events of the day, followed by a roundtable discussion about their experiences.
On Friday morning at 8 a.m., the “living dead” returned to school where an assembly was held to reflect on the events that occurred in the past 48 hours, including a video produced overnight depicting the accident and the events that followed.
Finally, keynote speaker Karen Torres discussed the dangers of distracted driving and her personal experience with losing her father in an accident in March 2006.
On St. Patrick’s Day 0f 2006 at 11:01 a.m., Torres received a call that “changed her life forever.”
“It doesn’t matter that it’s been 12 years, to me it feels like 12 seconds ago,” she said. “The pain of losing my father in such a horrific way, that pain never, ever goes away.”
When the driver of a cement truck, who was doing 60 miles per hour in a 45-speed zone, reached down to grab a fallen water bottle, he merged into a closed right lane, directly into a DOT-led work zone where he struck and killed Torres’ father, Patrick Mapleson.
The accident, Torres said, left her father “completely disfigured from the top of his head to the tip of toes.” Doctors at the hospital even refused the request of Mapleson’s kin to identify the body due to the graphic nature of his injuries.
When Torres’ husband stepped forward to identify the body, she said, “from that moment on, my husband had nightmares for a year and a half.”
Mapleson’s 66th birthday was just the day before, and he was getting ready to retire seven months later.
Torres said that the driver of the cement truck, a retired New York City fireman, locked eyes with her father before he killed him.
“[The driver] told me that my father’s face is the first person he sees when he wakes up, and the last person he sees before he goes to bed,” she said.
“I go around and share my dad’s story because I would never want any of you guys to have to stand up here and become an advocate against distracted driving because of someone you lost,” said Torres, a Long Islander who travels to schools across the state to speak on behalf of the New York traffic safety council.
“The key here is that this was 100 percent preventable,” said Torres. “Car crashes are the number one killer of teens between 16 and 20.”
Texting and driving, she added, has surpassed drunk driving as the leading cause of crashes amongst teens.
“Thankfully this accident was just a simulation, but it could’ve easily been real, and every emotion tied with it felt real,” said Saarah Vahtola, who played the drunk driver. Seeing her best friend Chris, who played a victim paralyzed by the incident, was “really, really difficult, because that is something that could easily happen,” she said.
Experiencing her time in court and hearing how she killed two people was “really unbearable.”
“I never want to imagine my own family trying to deal with my loss, so thinking that I caused other families’ pain … it broke me. That was the hardest part,” said Vahtola. “I pray that none of you felt how I felt yesterday, because that left me really empty. That was the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
“This program allows us the chance to see, but more importantly to feel, the effect of one mistake in our own lives and of the lives of those we cherish,” said Maria Costello, a “living dead” participant. “Every single person here has touched the lives of others in one way or another, and the loss of one is a loss for all.”
“The biggest lesson I’ve taken away personally from being a part of this program is that we can lose someone we love at any moment in time, no matter the circumstances, no matter the time. And regardless of whether or not we’ve had the chance to say goodbye. What I learned, and what I will take away from this is to always be present, and to always live in the moment,” said Costello.
For students who participated at the overnight retreat, F-M High School Principal Raymond Kilmer said their experiences were “life-changing.”
“Every year that we do this I open up my high school yearbook because there’s a memorial page for a young man who died,” he said. Though Kilmer was not friends with him, he remembered the impact his death had on the community.
“Your safety is so incredibly important,” he said.
Manlius Fire Chief Brad Pinsky said he “couldn’t be more proud of the department.”
While this was not the first time F-M High School has held the program, it was the first time Assistant Principals Mike O’Brien and Dr. Kathryn Daughton planned the event.
“I think it changed our lives as parents,” said Daughton. “The amazing thing about the F-M community and this school is that everyone here loves these kids so much. We never want to see anything bad happen. So, for as tough and emotionally-grating as it is, it’s worth it.”
Some “living dead” participants tearfully embraced one another at the end of the assembly, the events of the past 24 hours still weighing heavy on their minds. Though the events of the day prior weren’t exactly “real,” they certainly felt that way nonetheless.
