‘Don’t hit Santa,’ Sunrise Hospital directs intoxicated and distracted driving prevention at teens
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) -- A 19-year-old admitted to drinking tequila and smoking marijuana before getting behind the wheel and killing another driver early Saturday morning, according to Las Vegas Metro police. It’s the most recent example of reckless teenage driving that officials hope to avoid more of.
Those efforts include demonstrating the real-world dangers of such a vehicle collision. Several Las Vegas High School students collected outside Sunrise Hospital Wednesday morning for a live vehicle extrication with the Clark County Fire Department and UNLV Vulnerable Road Users Project, called ‘Santa is Coming to Town, Please Don’t Hit Him.’
Fire fighters used giant saws, claws and other tools to demonstrate how personnel would extract a person from a vehicle involved in a collision of this type. An already damaged vehicle was windowless and roofless by the end of the demonstration, highlighting the extreme measures taken to remove a trapped driver or passenger.
It provoked chilling memories for 17-year-old Alessandra Gonzales, who said a family friend she’s known since birth almost lost his life when he drove drunk earlier this year.
“He was coming back from a party, he was drunk, he was behind the wheel and then he did cause an accident,” Gonzales said in the parking lot of Sunrise Hospital. “He’s learning how to talk again. He has to learn how to walk again.”
Others, like 17-year-old Marcos Benavidez, acknowledge teens getting behind the wheel drunk or high is more common than parents may think.
“I know people that do it, sometimes, on the daily,” Benavidez said in front of the destroyed demonstration car. “They tell me stuff like, ‘yeah bro it was really hard for me to drive...' I do get scared sometimes when they go out to parties, because I’m like, ‘what if they don’t get home safe?’”
Data from Metro Police show that of the 17,666 vehicle collisions responded to this year through November 18, over 5,000 of them resulted in a DUI arrest. This, of course, only counts drivers who survived their crashes.
But, not all drivers do. Trauma Medical Director Dr. Chris Fisher said Sunrise Hospital has treated more than 5,000 trauma patients in 2022 alone.
“Trauma’s actually the number one cause of death in teenagers,” Fisher said outside the hospital. “When you see them severely injured or you know that they’ll never make a full recovery, it affects us as physicians, as staff. Having to tell parents the gravity of their injuries and so forth just because they made one mistake, it’s hard.”
Though he acknowledges prevention efforts like this won’t end intoxicated or distracted driving altogether, at least some high schoolers, like Niyauna Moorhead, took the demonstration to heart.
“I just seen a whole car get cut open,” Moorhead said while looking at the destroyed vehicle. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to see a kid all bloody.”
The most recent data from 2020 showed 2,800 teenagers were killed in vehicle collisions like this across the nation.
from KLAS https://ift.tt/1z9Jq8x
Comments
Post a Comment