Steps for daughter

Nearly two years ago, Laguna resident Lance Frazee was awoken by that early morning phone call that every parent of a teenager dreads.

“She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone.”

Those were the words — screams — at the other end of the line, he said, from his ex-wife and the mother of his 16-year-old daughter, Mackenzie Frazee, who lived with her mom in Tustin.

Lance was supposed to pick Mackenzie up a few hours later for a four-day father-daughter excursion while her mom went out of town.

“Instead, I found myself driving [to the morgue] to identify my little girl,” he said. “It was completely surreal. You feel like you’re going 110 miles per hour but then look down at the speedometer and realize you’re only doing 22. It’s like you’re torn between rushing to get there, but not wanting to ever get there.”

Late the prior evening, Mackenzie had gone to a party with some friends but then had second thoughts about being out because she had left home without permission.

She asked a friend and fellow classmate at Foothill High School for a ride back to her house in Tustin. She wasn’t aware her friend had been drinking, Lance said.

Moments later, speeding down Newport Avenue at 112 mph, the drunk driver slammed into a traffic signal pole, splitting the car in two, sending Mackenzie’s side crashing into a nearby wall.

She was pronounced dead less than an hour later, from blunt-force trauma to the head.

The 17-year-old driver was later tried as an adult and convicted of second-degree murder with a 15-year sentence. He’s serving time in prison.

“The biggest crime in all of this is that Mackenzie’s life was just starting,” Lance said. “All I kept thinking about was the things she won’t ever be able to do — go to prom, attend college, study art in Paris, get married and have a family.”

One of the things she had recently developed a love for, he said, was traveling, something he’d persistently tried to instill in her, as an avid traveler himself.

“She spent time studying in Rome, London and Paris, and we spent time together at our house in Spain,” he said. “We talked about traveling to more of the states together.”

For this reason, Lance has decided to walk across America for Mackenzie’s Missing Miles, where he will carry her ashes and scatter them in places she dreamed of going, including the Grand Canyon and Kansas City, where she hoped to spend time with extended family and learn more about her roots.

Lance will leave May 3. From there he will walk to the crash site in Tustin, and will then embark on a 3,000-mile journey to Mackenzie’s birth place in Wilmington, N.C., (he was stationed in Fort Bragg at the time) where he plans to arrive Aug. 28 — the anniversary of her death.

Along the way, he will stop to speak to schools and communities about underage drinking and the hazards of drunk driving.

“The best thing I can do is keep my daughter’s name alive, and tell her story so that it helps other people,” he said. “This isn’t about me; it’s about her.”

You can track Lance’s journey at www.mackenzies missingmiles.com.

He also recently founded the Mackenzie Frazee Foundation, which can also be accessed through the site, and benefits children who have lost parents to drunk driving or who have disabilities as a result of drunk driving.