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Students heighten drunk-driving awareness

Junior Whitney Bateson (left) and senior Jessica Levenberg encourage other students to take a look at a vehicle wrecked by a drunk driver.
4:18 p.m., Dec. 1, 2005--Sarah Lorch wanted to stop students in their tracks, so she convinced a towing company to drop a wrecked car on the patio in front of Perkins Student Center Wednesday, Nov. 30.

The Jeep, which had been involved in a drunk-driving accident, had its windshield crumpled and its steering wheel forced into the driver’s seat. The backseat was filled with notebooks.

“I was going along the lines of having something that’s really in your face,’’ Lorch, a senior psychology major who staged the event with other members of UD’s Mortar Board chapter, said. “When you’re dealing with college students, it’s important to have something very real and very visual.”

When students slowed to look at the car, Denise Boone of Newark approached them with photos of her 20-year-old daughter, Cynthia Marie, and the crash that killed her last year.

Some students recognized Boone’s daughter, the victim of a drunk driver, because she worked at the Sunoco station on Elkton Road in Newark.

“I give them what we’re giving out and ask them not to drink and drive because people need to be aware of how quickly [their lives] can be shattered,” Boone said. “It’s not just another mistake. Your whole life changes. There are siblings and parents who are affected. It’s a nightmare that you never wake up from. It’s a shift in reality, and it never shifts back.”

Boone, a volunteer with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), said students stood in the cold and listened to what she had to say, and a few took the time to look through a photo album she had compiled after her daughter’s death. “It’s nice to know that there are actually some kids who care,’’ she said.

As students peeked inside the car, junior Whitney Bateson, a member of Mortar Board, said, “You don’t think about it when you’re driving that the steering wheel is going to come down through the dashboard like that, and your head is going to go through the windshield. It’s very scary.”

Campus police, Mortar Board Society members, MADD staff and Tracy Downs, program director for the Center for Counseling and Student Development, staffed an information table at the Perkins event.

Trish Bachman, victim services representative for MADD’s Delaware chapter, lauded UD’s Mortar Board Society members for pulling the event together.

Downs said UD’s Alcohol Policy and Education Council (APEC) is currently planning a new education campaign around alcohol issues.

Article by Kathy Canavan
Photo by Sarah Simon, AS ‘06

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