The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Mock DWI teaches students life lessons
Student actors and local first responders demonstrated the real world consequences of bad choices.
VERNON, N.Y.>> MelanieMiller had to let go of her son plenty of times throughout his young life, but on Friday, she had to let him go for good.
“When he was born, I held my baby in my arms for the first time and as I looked at his little face, I said, ‘Mommy will always protect you and never let you go’,” she told junior and senior students at Vernon-Verona-Sherrill High School during a staged eulogy for her son, Brennan, the “vic- tim” of a mock DWI crash held Friday morning. “As parents, we expect to die first. We don’t expect to bury our child.”
Students sat in silence in the gym as Miller recounted all the times she’d let Brennan go: when he first learned to walk; the first day of pre-K; when he learned to ride a bike. “I held the seat behind him, protecting his balance, until he yelled ‘OK, mom, let me go!’,” she said. “I didn’t realise the significance of that statement until he started driving on his own.
“I never thought that ‘letting go’ would mean forever for me,” she said. Brennan was one of six students to design and perform the mock accident to raise awareness about drinking under the influence of alcohol and drugs, as well as texting while driving. The teens staged the scenario thusly: the VVS baseball team won the varsity championship and the school was celebrating with a bonfire. A couple of friends decided they’d grab some beers first, while the others grabbed a bite to eat. Theymet on the road and decided to race to see who could get to the intersection first. Then, tragedy, as one car tried
to stop but couldn’t, and the vehicles collided, “killing” Brennan and “injuring” three others, including one who had to be airlifted out by Mercy Flight.
“How do I ever cope with the loss of my son?” Miller asked the students as she stood in front of a casket and flowers in the gym. “That was your fault. I cannot forgive you for the choice you made that changed my life forever.”
“Take this stuff seriously,” said junior Jordan Schaffer, who played the drunk driver during the demonstration.
“This was really hard for me,” said junior Nate Brewer, who called 911 during the mock accident. “I saw my best friend get put into a body bag, and his mom-- my secondmom -- come running to me to know what happened.
“It’s something youwish would never happen,” he said. “This is real. This is serious.”
“The message is clear,” said Oneida County Sheriff RobertMaciol, one of many local leaders asked to speak following the demonstration. “When people make poor, destructive choices, terrible things happen.”
He stressed how accidents like the mock one held earlier don’t only affect one person.
The families of the drunk driver, the victims, and the first responders are all affected, as well.
“These fellows don’t want to pull a dead body out of a car,” he said of the volunteer departmentswho assisted in the accident. “There’s nothing worse than knocking on a door at 2 in the morning and telling someone their family member has died.”
School social worker Brandy-Lee Lappin and teacher Jason Merrill helped coordinate the mock accident, which the school hasn’t held in several years.
Lappin said she wants to make this a biannual event to show students the real world effects their actions can have.
“What happened out there is mock, and we want to keep it that way,” said Oneida County Stop DWI coordinator Thomas Giruzzi.
“I don’t ever want to see any of you in this room in a court room from the other side,” said Assistant District Attorney Paul Kelly.
Father William Mesmer of St. Helena Parish talked about grief, and how every student there would experience it at some point in their lives -- if they hadn’t already.
“Grief is not sorrow,” he said. “Sorrow is a beautiful human trait. Grief is an external suffering caused by a terrible outside problem. Grief, sometimes, will be forever. I’m speaking today of scars that never go away.”
Bruce Ironside of Ironside Funeral Homes talked about how he has to face grief everyday as part of his profession, helping guide families through decisions they sometimes aren’t ready for.
“They get labelled with a word across their chest,” he said. “Survivor.”
He said accidents like the one held Friday, or tragedies like drug overdoses that have seen an uptick thanks to the opioid crisis, leave lifelong impacts on the victims and families of those who are lost, and he urged the students to be smart and think through their actions before something terrible happened.
“Don’t make somebody else a survivor,” he said.