001nope well when you're driving you know you go stop at starbucks or in this case duncan and you're like oh i want to take a drink of my latte you're also taking your hand off the wheel so your reaction time has been is slower and then you're also taking a drink and you're taking your eyes off the road or it doesn't even have to be the driver the passenger can be all like here try my latte it's really good of course and that's where you mess up so it's always good to keep your hands on the wheel and not even if it is a good latte arachnids missiles meth tornadoes but how in the world could how in the world could your friends be lethal oh my gosh look at this text i got oh
002that's cool yeah oh my god this is my gym whoa see this is a prime example of how your friends could be lethal it doesn't have to be just your friends out in your everyday life it's them in a car distracting you and taking your eyes and hands off the road and the wheel and that's that's how your friends could be lethal okay so how many of you have been a passenger in a car in someone else's car in the last week pretty much all of us so how many of you have either talked to the driver or someone else in the car or listened to your favorite song really loudly pretty much all of us so we don't normally think of ourselves as being a distraction but in fact we're one of the most
003lethal distractions to the driver as a passenger we affect how the driver sees the road hears other cars and how much attention he's paying so when you're in the car with someone you need to be respectful of them and not be a distraction or put anyone else in danger he was my teammate he was my son he was a classmate he was my best friend he was my boyfriend my son i met donovan in about eighth grade and we just immediately became friends we just connected and i came here before my freshman year he was the first person that actually like talked to me and like introduced me to his friends looking at how we interact with others being proud donna was definitely a person he attracted he really wanted everyone to just have fun
004he was an excellent student he had on the highest gpa so before he's even in high school was already talking about you know going on into college and having a family and he has your whole life left out he started playing football in junior high i just kind of looked up to him when i played i was playing line he was the running back and uh i let block him all the way before i touched him and ever since then he's becoming good friends he had a lot of fans especially the girls so everybody wanted to wear his jerseys he was really nice to everybody he was an all-star on the field i see him as the leader of the pack he would not only lead by example but also try to help others sort
005through whatever they were going through in their own lives if you're having a bad day you'll be the first one to be up and you're like let's go to the park and feed the ducks it was actually where we spent our first date it's really special a day i'll never forget life is i do it forever and we're driving home we're just kids having fun we're blaring the music up really loud and i noticed that we were going pretty fast and it was causing the car to swerve back and forth and we're like making fun of our town like can't you keep the car like in a straight line my response was oh like this and my journey will go backwards the next thing i know i just see a tree coming at us i
006remember like all the sounds of like the car crashing i looked around and i see jonathan but he wasn't moving so i sat with you i'm talking about he's dead dead i even remember calling out diamond's name my son no my boy and i think that was one of the most painful things to experience was hearing mothers crying about her son the screaming of a mother just not [ __ ] out there and all simply because of something that was so preventable we're just going home speed wasn't really a factor before i knew it like in a matter of seconds we lost best friend i immediately felt that it was my fault and i felt guilty i felt ashamed and they just told me that they forgave me it was not all her fault and we wanted
007her to make sure she heard that progress all three of us in the back could have said put our seat belts on which will damage drive safe but so i feel like we were all at fault like i wanted to say hey guys maybe we should slow down but that's not really i kind of want to feel like he's a little you just have to think in your head if i do this it could mess up my life totally if i can get in a crash i'm gonna have to live with the consequences of the rest of my life i went from having a brother that was one of my best friends took hand of the child he only took one one moment of that decision on his part to lose that life [Music] good
008all right so uh as you can watch the video i remember watching for the first time just kind of how emotional it can make you it really kind of tugs on your heart makes you think about the choices that you've made in the past or the choices you're making today as passengers or as drivers and in this case unfortunately we saw some bad decisions made which unfortunately took the life of a beloved friend a boyfriend a son and it affects everybody around you it didn't just affect the victim but it affected his whole family his mom his dad all of his friends so it's very very hard to watch but the one thing that you guys could take away from it all is that it was 100 100 preventable uh some crashes they might not
009be 100 preventable but distracted driving um in this case it should have been preventable the steering on the jerking of the wheel the screaming of the music and the passengers all the distractions it could have been very easily prevented so that's why it's important we have three stars here that every time you get in a vehicle you have to decide make the choice as we've emphasized to be a good passenger be a responsible driver you may not always get a second chance to make a good choice and unfortunately that was the case here and unfortunately nearly 4 000 teens a year do not get that chance to make a good choice again so that's important to just think about remember so we've talked a lot about choices and we want to emphasize that we don't
010want us or anyone around us that we're talking to to be the ones that we're watching the videos about all over the country people are watching videos of people like donovan who made the bad choice and we don't want to be the ones that are on those videos so um when you're in the car as a passenger or as a driver we want to make good choices so don't make the choice to talk to your friends or reach over like they were saying and grab the lattes look at the lipstick common distractions like those but also speeding and substance abuse those are the laws and we should follow them but it's especially important when you're driving to make sure you're being safe for your passengers and for your driver so as drivers we want to
011make good choices and some of the following are good choices that we can make buckle up it takes two to five seconds to hear the click of your seatbelt and it can be the difference between life or death and it's the wall so we should all follow it and wear it put the phone away i know a lot of us just put it in our cup holder but as soon as the light goes off our first reaction is to grab it so i would recommend putting it in the glove box or center console so you're not tempted to grab it even if the light goes off um stay focused like we said previously there's a lot of distractions that can come into the car like your friends music your phone anything else stay focused on
012the roads and your surroundings so you have that reaction time and have that barrier if anything could happen allow time for condition conditions so if it's snowing foggy or rainy make sure that you allow yourself in order time to get to school or where you need to go because you don't want to be speeding and that could be caused a bad decision in order to get where you need to go um speak up like donovan's friend said he didn't want to speak up because he didn't want to be seen as the baby we want to teach people that it's okay to speak up so if you're in the car with somebody who you see is on their phone or adjusting their radio or going too fast speak up and be that voice telling them that
013they need to slow down and focus to their surroundings okay so can everybody tell in this poster there's a skull okay so this poster is made up of thousands of little dots each one representing a team that died within the last year between the ages of 13 and 20. and more specifically the white dots that create the school represent teens that died due to car crashes within the last year there's nearly 4 000 white dots up there okay that's a lot of deaths and when you think of that number it becomes easier to perceive and think about how many people are affected by just one teenage death let alone the four thousand right there's families relatives friends peers all of that yet it swept under the rug i know me personally six months ago before
014we started training on this probably a lot of these guys too when we were asked what do you consider lethal we didn't think you know driving we thought alcohol substance abuse things like that now with this it's 100 preventable ride like ben touched on earlier if you pay attention you keep your hands on the wheels you're focused you know what i mean you got your music down you got your friends being good passengers you can stay safe drive more safely and then just eliminate the chances of crashing or even death so this right here is called the wheel of death it gives you your percentage of being getting into a crash with different scenarios so the first scenario i'm gonna give you is there's a basketball game on saturday night so let's just say you
015go you have two passengers you go to change your radio station and you have no other distractions your percentage of crashing just went up did any of you have any passengers this morning okay how many passengers do you have did you ever change your review mess with the music yes so did you ever get on your phone at all no no okay so having three passengers during the day changing your music your percentage of crashing just went up 582 because you changed your radio station and did not and took your eyes off the room so we want to emphasize that there are many things that you can do to help prevent that one of the things being is on your phone if you guys know