'A little bit of reality'Mock crash demonstrates perils of drinking and driving

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

NICOLLET -- An estimated 160 high school students witnessed a fatal car crash in the Nicollet Public School parking lot Thursday afternoon.

Thing is, it wasn't real.

It was a mock crash staged by Nicollet firefighters, EMTs, Nicollet County deputies, a State Trooper and the crew of the Mayo One emergency helicopter.

If it had been real, it would've been an example of what Nicollet County Deputy Sheriff Joey Olsen called "the No. one killer of people under 18."

"Statistics don't mean alot to a lot of you, so how am I supposed to get the message across?" he said before the scene unfolded. "I think the best way is to actually show you."

The mock crash took roughly an hour from the time that the two wrecked cars were unveiled to the point where the white Cadillac hearse from Minnesota Valley Funeral Home slowly rolled into the parking lot.

Students saw how emergency services typically respond to 911 calls about traffic collisions.

The scene opened with a recording of some teenagers talking about finding a party and then talking about what a great game they had just seen. And then, the crash happens and the wrecked cars are unveiled.

A car full of girls then pulls up and all of them get out. One calls 911 on her cell phone and the call, as well as the ensuing radio traffic between the dispatcher and a Nicollet County deputy, is played for the audience over the P.A.

A Nicollet County deputy was the first to arrive at the scene of the accident and checked the passengers in each vehicle.

Nicollet's rescue squad arrived at the scene shortly afterwards and went to work cutting the driver's door and then the roof off one of the cars. A Minnesota State Trooper came a short while later and interviewed the driver of the other vehicle, then performed field sobriety tests on him and eventually arrested him and took him away from the scene.

During that time, ambulance crews from St. Peter came and took two passengers away from the scene on stretchers.

Practically every student in the bleachers stood and looked eastward when the Mayo One helicopter arrived to take one of the passengers away from the scene.

After Mayo One had loaded the passenger into its rear bay, the crew turned the rotors off and the white hearse glided up the drive and into the parking lot to the strains of a Sarah McLachlan song.

A man and a woman, both dressed in black suits, brought a gurney from the back of the hearse, set it down beside the body of a girl who was lying on the ground and put her in a body bag and drove off.

"That was a little bit of the reality of traffic crashes," Olsen said after the hearse left, adding that one of the worst realities for a parent is to learn that a child has died in a car crash.

Lynn Schultz was one mother to whom Olsen once delivered such news. Schultz lost her daughter Lauren Schultz in a car crash near Mankato five years ago.

"I cannot honor her memory and choose to say nothing," she said.

Laura Schultz was on her way home from a football game with three of her friends when a drunk driver crossed the center line and struck the car Laura was riding in head-on. The car burst into flames, killing all three teenagers.

The driver, a 38-year old father of three children, died later at Immanuel-St. Joseph Hospital.

Laura's body was so badly burned that she had to be identified by her dental records.

"The best I can hope for is to share her story with the people who need to hear it the most," Lynn Schultz said.

Nicollet English teacher Cindy Zacharias, who is the advisor for the Nicollet Public School chapter of Students Against Drunk Driving, said the crash was held because alcohol-related fatal crashes typically start happening around the times when most schools have their proms and graduations.

Alcohol-related crashes claim more than 200 lives and account for 35 to 40 percent of all fatal crashes. Nearly half of the alcohol-related traffic deaths in Minnesota involve people in between 15 and 24 years of age, according to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.

"It was hard to watch," said Dana Smith, a science teacher at Nicollet Public School. "It can happen to any one of those kids and that's what hits you hardest."