MANSFIELD — Rolling up to cover a fatal crash on Thursday morning sent me back more than 25 years.
Thank goodness this one was fake — the 30th annual Richland County Mock Crash, sponsored by the Richland County 4-H Youth Safety Council.
As I watched local law enforcement, firefighters and coroner’s office personnel work the “crash scene” involving cars of teenagers at the Richland County Fairgrounds, my mind flickered back to the mid-1990s.
I was the city editor at a newspaper in southwest Ohio when five local teenagers, all packed into the same small car, died in a two-vehicle crash on a warm spring night.
In that wreck, the 18-year-old driver had been drinking when the kids decided to “shoot the tube,” a too-common practice in which the driver turned off the car headlights and drove as fast as he could on a curvy, two-lane township road that connected two major highways.
Tragically, a local farmer was backing his pickup truck out of his driveway as the teens crested a hill toward him at high speed. Without the car’s headlights, he never saw them coming.
All five teens, ages 18 to 14, died instantly.
Thankfully, no one died at the fairgrounds on Thursday morning. Hopefully, for the hundreds of high school students who sat quietly in the grandstand during the docu-drama, it will be as close as they get to such a scene.
It involved a two-car accident that resulted in one death and multiple injuries.
“By giving these local youth the opportunity to view such a docu-drama, it increases their awareness to the dangers of multiple teen passengers in a vehicle, driver distractions such as cell phones and text messaging, drinking and driving, drug abuse, the effects of not wearing seat belts and what can happen when youth do not consider the consequences of their actions,” said Judy Villard-Overrocker, extension educator for 4-H youth development and coordinator of the mock crash since it began.
It’s no coincidence the crash is timed each year to coincide with high school prom and graduation season.
“We want kids to have a great time at the end of the school year, but we also want them to live and enjoy adulthood,” she said. “The goal of this program is to reduce the injury or save the life of at least one person in the youth audience and help portray the importance of safety at all times when driving as teens and as adults.
“Safe driving is an important message every day of the year, but prom and graduation time seems to carry a high level of excitement for teen drivers,” she said.
The fact is that vehicular crashes are still the No. 1 killer of youth between ages 16 and 20 across the United States.
More than 43,000 area students have watched the mock crash docu-drama since it began three decades ago.
Villard-Overrocker thanked area school districts, area law enforcement and fire department personnel, coroner’s office and others who helped make the mock crash another success.
At the end of the docu-drama, all of the students — those watching and those “performing” in the event — all went back to their schools and back to classes.
That was starkly different from the accident I recalled in southwest Ohio. None of the teens went home that night. That is something I hope to never see again.
