Mock Crash Delivers Strong Lesson to Teens

The mother’s keening wail echoed throughout the Thousand Oaks High School football stadium.

“Help me,” she sobbed, her shirt spattered with blood after a steel-mangling, glass-shattering car accident. “My daughter’s trapped. She’s not awake. Somebody help meeeee.”

In the student-packed bleachers around her, laughter yielded to nervous twitters. Nervous twitters subsided to sober silence.

That was exactly the point.

To underscore the violent side of graduation and prom parties, the crash was dramatized: At 3 a.m. on a deserted Thousand Oaks street, a Volkswagen Jetta carrying four rowdy, drunken teens broadsides a Chevy Blazer driven by a mother whose 12-year-old daughter is a passenger.

The message was deadly serious: Drinking and driving kills.

With the Thousand Oaks High prom less than a week away, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, the county Fire Department, actors from Cal Lutheran University and MedTrans emergency medical technicians enacted, in real time, a fatal collision.

About 500 seniors anxiously watched as victims cried for help. They waited the seemingly endless minutes it took for authorities to respond. They heard the squawking of radio calls, the creaking of the rescue equipment, the antiseptic clicks of a gurney unfolding. They witnessed a teenager, dulled by the effects of eight to 10 beers, stumble through a sobriety test.

At the end, three people--two of them intoxicated teens and the other an innocent child--were dead. The driver was headed for the California Youth Authority.

“We know that kids are going to go out and party,” said Deputy Darin Rich. “But if they’re going to drink--and we’d prefer that they not--they should call a cab or make arrangements with their parents.”

In the last three years, Thousand Oaks hasn’t had any fatal alcohol-related accidents around the end of the school year, he said. “But our sister cities, Moorpark and Simi Valley, have not been so lucky.”

The high school students watching the simulated crash said they were moved.

“I thought it was pretty sad,” said senior Mike Reinhart, 18. “It’s always the drunk driver who doesn’t get hurt.”

Added senior Nick Smith, 18: “No one ever thinks it can happen to them. But it can.”

Actually seeing a crash--even a fake crash--is more effective than listening to preachy public service announcements or lectures, said Cal Lutheran sophomore Julie Baumgartner, who portrayed the distraught mother in the crash.

“I think people don’t realize the impact of drunk driving until they see the consequences,” the 20-year-old said. “I know at first, people were laughing in the audience. But by the end, it was quiet. No one was laughing anymore.”