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Teen Drivers Learn That Safety Is Life Or Death Issue
By Bill McLaughlin
Luke Rizzi and four of his buddies were among the first juniors to arrive at the Central Regional school auditorium shortly after 8 a.m. on a recent Friday.
After all, anything having to do with cars interested them more than most school subjects. But this was an assembly about the bad things that can happen behind the wheel of your shiny, new ride.
Rizzi said he and his dad, Joseph, have been working on a 1992 Camaro that will someday be his ticket to the open road and freedom.
"It's in good condition, my dad made sure of that," Rizzi said.
The 16-year-old is counting the days until he gets his learner's permit, and his buddies agreed that would be awesome.
An older generation can probably hear the strains of "Born to Be Wild" pumping through their heads as they read this. The lyrics talk of getting "your motor running" and "heading out on the highway," and that's pretty much the American dream for a lot of male teens.
But after sitting through a half-hour Teen Driving Safety Forum presentation by Lieutenant John Mount of the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office,the audience was sort of shaken. They saw the aftermath of the only mistake a number of teen drivers ever made.
"They're nasty pictures. We won't show gory pictures of bodies, we will show the body bags as they're taken away," Mount said before the show. "But this power point presentation will show the aftermath of collisions brought on by careless driving."
Mount said he has had the unenviable task of investigating traffic deaths of the children of close friends and neighbors.
"Let me tell you, it's not a pleasant thing to knock on a friend's door in the early morning hours with that kind of news," Mount said as he shook his head.
The photos he shows are mainly of mangled vehicles, of clothing strewn about and, in one case, the bodies of two victims barely recognizable as they are scrunched in among the debris.
With the lights down low, you can hear the students gasp and whisper in recognition of fatal crashes in Berkeley, Manchester and Toms River - all within the past few months.
"At a time when vehicles are being made safer, with better engineering, they're also more powerful and are riding more smoothly on better roads."
Mount's vehicular homicide unit investigated 74 fatal accidents last year, 95 percent of them preventable, he said.
"I've always been a seat belt person," he said. "We would cut fatals in half if the victims were wearing seat belts."
Those statistics and others bear out the truths about being young and invincible: 40 percent of teen deaths (ages 15-20) are in car crashes and one in three fatal accidents involved a teenage driver. Most teen crashes occur at night or on weekends. Also, most novice drivers have a crash of some kind within the first 10 months behind the wheel and eight of 19 teen fatalities in Ocean County last year involved alcohol or drugs.
"We recently had an accident involving two people," Mount said. "A 17-year-old passenger was wearing a seat belt; the 17-year-old driver was not. Who lived?"
The seat belt makes a difference, he said. It doesn't guarantee you'll survive a crash but it can't hurt.
"And the reasons given for not wearing one? It wrinkles my dress, it constricts me," Mount said.
Rizzi and his "posse" seemed chastened by the presentation, though not thrilled when Mount used them as show-and-tell props. Rizzi was asked to read aloud a letter expressing the anguish of losing a loved one to a crash. He did a good job reading the lines as his classmates appreciated the suffering involved.
"Yeah, that was something you don't want your folks to have to deal with," Rizzi said. "You have to learn the right way and obey the laws or you'll lose your license."
Mount could not have said it any better.
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