Photo by Brian P. Heilman
High school students Kayla Dahl and Jess Hoffert, performing in Thursdayβs mock crash at Winona Senior High School, react with shock and sadness to the portrayal of the alcohol-induced crash that claimed the lives of their friends, also played by local students. |
Parents share accounts of teens' deaths with students
by CYNTHYA PORTER
Two photos sat on the stage of the Winona Senior High School Auditorium Friday, in each the face of a smiling teenage girl. Both teens were radiant, each with her head cocked playfully to the side as she mugged for the camera.
Seated facing these photos was a packed house of high school juniors from WSHS and Cotter. They listened somberly as the parents of Beth Ann Hoyme and Brianna Vitek talked about how senseless it is for their daughters to be dead.
The event was held in conjunction with a mock prom night crash to warn high schoolers of the dangers lurking in some of the decisions they have to make at upcoming proms and beyond.
Beth was a 17-year-old Zumbrota senior when a drunk driver drove head-on into her car and killed her in April of 1999. News accounts from that time say the driver was a 49-year-old man who admitted he drank about a dozen beers before driving the wrong way down Highway 52.
The driver of the car that had been behind Beth's car, and held her hand while she was dying, wrote a gut-wrenching letter to her family not long after the crash, and each tortured word of it hit the auditorium walls Friday like a stone.
"I looked at you covered in blood and glass and I thought, ‘Oh God, she's just a young girl.'" The SUV driven by the drunk man appeared comparatively undamaged, the woman wrote, "and there was your car looking as if it had just exploded." The woman recounted how she was surprised to find a weak pulse, and how she stayed with Beth and whispered hopeful words while they waited for help. "I was holding your head in my hands, stroking your hair. I noticed everything about you, your blonde hair and your gold jewelry. You opened your eyes for a minute, and there was so much terror in them. We formed a bond in that moment."
The woman talked about seeing Beth's picture in the paper the next day, the beautiful, smiling girl a stark contrast to the dying girl the day before. Inextricably linked to Beth and her death, the woman went to the funeral even though she didn't know the family and they didn't know her. In the letter, which was addressed to Beth in heaven, the woman talked about seeing her parents there, and how raw their grief was after losing their only daughter. "If you could have seen them; their pain filled the building, the whole town it seemed."
As the strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D drifted through the auditorium, Beth's father Garry told the students that Beth had pronounced that song would be her wedding march one day. That day will never come he said, choking on emotion, and the song was played at her funeral instead.
"Please keep our Beth in your thoughts when you think about drinking and driving or not wearing a seat belt," her mother said. "Life is too precious. When you are alone or with your friends you have to remember that you are the boss of you. Take responsibility, make wise decisions, be strong, and have a good life."
Beth Hoyme, who was buried in the dress she was supposed to wear to her senior prom, was a victim of a crime over which only the drunk driver had any control, her parents said, and her death caused a wound that will never heal. "The presence of her absence is everywhere," Shirley Hoyme told the juniors. "Life goes on, I just forgot why."
Brianna Vitek's father John hopes that because life does go on, something good can come of something that was really, really bad.
Brianna, who was a 16-year-old junior at WSHS, was killed in a single-car accident just before 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning last January. Brianna was a religious seat belt wearer, he said, but that morning she made a mistake. "That morning she did something most people have done," Vitek said. "She took off her seat belt and reached across the car for something. About three seconds later she was ejected from the vehicle."
Just about everything else in the car was slingshotted out the windows too, Vitek said, because that's what happens when a car rolls over. A reconstruction showed that the car traveled 160 feet as it crashed, and Brianna's belongings were found by her friends across the entire area.
During the days since Brianna's death, Vitek said he has spent time researching, trying to understand the nature and scope of the accident that took his daughter's life. What he found, he said, is that three contributing factors make drivers under 18 more likely to die in single-car crashes than any other group: Inexperience, speed, and lack of seat belt use.
"Twenty thousand kids your age will die this year in single-car accidents," Vitek told the students.
In an exercise, Vitek had the students count out loud with him while he snapped his fingers. Just as their lips formed the second number he called out, "Stop!" That, he said, is the amount of time it takes to lose control of a vehicle. At 70 miles per hour, he said, a car is traveling 102 feet per second. "When you're losing control of the vehicle there is not enough time for the brain to know what the right thing to do is," he explained.
A steering correction device called Electronic Steering Control that is now being installed in some vehicles can make split-second adjustments to help prevent a crash when it senses a car losing control, Vitek said, and research suggests that if installed in every car on the road it could mean a 30% reduction in single-car accidents. Still, he said, driver attentiveness is the most important thing in the car.
Vitek admitted that he had only been an occasional seat belt user before Brianna's death, lulled into a sense of harmlessness by his short drive and the fact that his car has airbags. But Brianna's car had front and side airbags too, he said, none of which were deployed during the crash. It is not a malfunction, Vitek said; airbags are not designed to open in a rollover crash.
Diligent seat belt use, Vitek said, would reduce fatal accidents by 40% according to researchers. And taking the seat belt off just for a second to do something is even more dangerous, he said, because it likely also means you are not paying attention.
Vitek said he and his wife, Caer, sat outside in the parking lot before school started that morning and tabulated seat belt use as students arrived. For the most part, he said, students earned an "A" from the couple, although they observed something interesting as the minutes wound down to the first bell. Students arriving the latest were more likely to not have a seat belt fastened. "Put those two things together," he said, "running late, rushing and no seat belt."
Vitek said he and his family had been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from the community, and especially many of the students sitting in the auditorium that day who were Brianna's classmates and friends. "We have come to care for all of you in this room in a new and profound way," he said, and seeing the number of people affected by Brianna's death is indicative of the effect each person has on the world around them. "Each of you matters to a whole lot of people more, unfortunately, than you know," he said to a room filled with thousands of tears.
A friend of Brianna's shared a memorial plaque designed to remember Brianna Vitek that will hang in the high school. On it was a poem that started with the words, "Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much"¦" Those words fit Brianna well, but she did not get to do those things for long enough, her friend said.
Vitek unveiled a poster with an image of a seat belt buckle and the words, "Click 2 Live," a promotion developed after Brianna's death. The image also graced stickers that friends of Brianna's passed out to students in the audience, stickers that they hoped would serve as a reminder and bring about something good.
He wasn't standing up there to preach, Vitek said, but to have Brianna's death make a difference. "I have just a single plea, a simple request: Help make something good out of something really bad." he said. "Slow down, pay attention and click to live."
WSHS, Cotter actors enact prom night crash
by BRIAN P. HEILMAN
The car wrecks, wounds and story lines may not have been authentic at Thursday morning's mock crash performance in the Winona Senior High School parking lot, but the emotions certainly were.
The senior classes from both Winona high schools gathered in bleachers to observe their peers reenacting a prom nightmare: a fatal car crash induced by drunk driving.
As the performance began and the air filled with a melange of screams, sirens, and whirling helicopter blades, several audience members succumbed to the illusion's awesome power, crying real tears over the feigned tragedies.
For the performers, the experience was even more haunting.
"It was surprisingly real," said Cotter junior Aaron Gernes afterward, echoing the feelings of fellow performers Paul McCormack and Jeramy Girard. All three young men wore tattered tuxedos and had made-up wounds on their faces and arms.
"Once they started with the jaws of life," said McCormack, whose character was trapped in a rolled-over van for several minutes, "it just felt like I was really there."
Rachel Wolfe played the role of the young woman responsible for the accident. Wolfe had performed in plays at Cotter in the past, but said the experience of pretending she had killed her friends was "really eerie."
"I just started screaming," said Senior High's Kayla Dahl. "I freaked."
Dahl and Jess Hoffert played sober characters, witnesses to the horror befalling their friends.
"At first I was really nervous about making it real enough," Hoffert said. "But once we started my adrenaline got moving."
The morning's performers were selected from Cotter High School's Peer Helpers group and Winona Senior High's Helping Others & Peers Expand (H.O.P.E.) group.
In addition to the student performers, representatives from the Winona Police Department, Winona Area Ambulance, the Winona Fire Department, and Medlink assisted with the simulation. Law enforcement and safety personnel followed the exact protocol they would follow if they encountered such an accident.
"This is our tenth year of doing this," said Winona Senior High counselor Maryann Dennis, who helped bring the idea to Winona after hearing of a metro high school that had done such an event.
Dennis works with the student performers and their families before and after the performance, simply because the emotions generated are so real.
"The parents are usually crying in the audience," she said, "because it does feel so real. It creates a lot of emotion."
Dennis thanked all the community volunteers who helped run the event, calling the entire concern "a community issue."
"Even though the day was hard, it was a reminder that this can happen and that we all have to do our part," she said.
Both the mock crash and a simultaneous presentation in the WSHS auditorium were planned to coincide with prom, the formal dance which will take place this weekend.
Dennis and others hope that teaching students the dangers of risk behaviors including alcohol use, driving while intoxicated, speeding, and not wearing a seat belt will help prevent a tragedy on the big night.
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