Panel offers sobering lessons

Ambulance worker shares experience at accident that killed two people

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- It's been about 3 1/2 years since John Dietz was on the scene of a traffic accident just north of New Ulm with the other guys in his ambulance crew, but he still remembers what he saw that night.

It was on Halloween night in 1998. Dietz was at home sleeping that Saturday when the phone rang at 1 a.m.

It was an ambulance call. The accident was about 1 1/2 miles north of town. The call seemed all too familiar to Dietz and the others in his ambulance crew.

"We just looked at each other and said 'Alcohol's involved,'" Dietz told two different high school crowds Monday.

When the ambulance arrived on the scene, marks in the gravel suggested the pickup truck had tried to stay on the road. Instead, it was lying upside down. The crew instantly began to assess the scene, Dietz said.

They determined there were two people inside the truck -- both were dead.

"Those two people are not going home," Dietz remembered saying.

The ambulance crew assessed the scene further. They found two more passengers, a pair of teen-age girls, walking around near the scene. One of them later gave Dietz a look and said "There's five of us."

The fifth passenger was found bleeding profusely in the roadside ditch and was walking around picking up beer bottles and putting them in the bed of another pickup truck to avoid getting caught with alcohol, Dietz said.

"I'm not trained in death notification," he told the students at Cathedral and New Ulm High School. "My job is to save people."

Dietz was speaking as a part of two presentations given to area high schoolers by Healthy Communities Healthy Youth and the New Ulm Police Department.

One of the death notifications Dietz gave that night was to his dispatcher, whom he knew from work for several years

That dispatcher, Colleen Weber, lost her son Mike in the accident.

Weber was on duty as a nurse at New Ulm Medical Center. She was working dispatch that night, very much like she has done for the last 29 years.

A call came in. There was an accident just north of town. Within minutes after Dietz's ambulance crew reached the scene, she learned there was one fatality, then two.

Weber was in the emergency room getting extra supplies for the victims when the charge nurse came in and told her that Mike was one of the people who died in the accident.

"I was totally numb," Weber remembered.

The others injured in the accident, who were some of Mike's best friends, were brought into the emergency room that night. Weber remembers one of them, Justin, screaming in pain. She also remembers being asked to pick a funeral home to go pick up Mike's body.

"Earlier that day, Mike and I had been talking about his future and we talked about his plans for the weekend," Weber said.

Her son was planning to go to school to learn how to be a mechanic. He had a snowmobile out and ready to go, even though it was October. His friends revved the engines of their trucks at his funeral in tribute.

Weber told students to make mental lists of things like what funeral home they want to handle their funeral and what clothes they want to be buried in and to make lists of casketbearers and pick flowers for their caskets.

"Drunk driving is not an accident," Weber said. "It is a choice."

NUPD Commander Erv Weinkauf said he coached Mike Weber in two sports.

"That was one of the toughest funerals I had to go to," remembered Weinkauf.

Bryant Weaver and Camden Racine of Faribault, other participants in the presentation, remembered losing one of their best friends a year ago in May. There were about 150 people at a house party "when all hell broke loose," remembered Weaver.

It was after a softball game in Waterville, and several people showed up at the house looking for a fight. A Chevrolet Blazer sped through the front yard and ran over Freddy, one of their friends.

"He was just laying there on the ground in a pool of blood," Weaver said. Freddy died at the hospital later that night.

"I thought I was invincible," said Racine. "I thought it couldn't happen to us. I heard about it on the news all the time, but I never thought it could happen to me."

Dietz asked students to make contracts with loved ones that say the students won't drive if they've been drinking and won't ride in a vehicle with someone who has been drinking, but instead will call that loved one -- no questions asked.

"Your prom is May 4," Dietz said. "I'll be on duty that night. Unless it's at a ball game, you better hope you don't see me ... because if you see me, something bad has happened."