Close to Home: Protect kids from ‘the 100 deadliest days’

The best day of the year for most kids — the last day of school — was nigh. I think it was the end of my junior year, but it might have been senior.

An old-time PE teacher who also coached and taught driver’s ed had a group of us gather round. Speaking somberly and seemingly from the heart, he pleaded with us to go safely into summer vacation.

As I recall, he said that every summer, or at least most summers, he would lose one or more students or graduates to traffic fatalities. He told us the risk is real, the pain bottomless. He urged us to, please, use our heads when driving.

I don’t recall how far into summer it was that a classmate of mine died violently in a car crash, but it wasn’t far. Nearly 50 years later, word of a roadway nightmare the likes of the one in Rohnert Park on Saturday night that claimed 16-year-old Amada Salinas-Agular and 17-year-old Lorena Recendez-Martinez vividly brings back the coach’s plea.

These summertime auto fatalities involving students or brand-new graduates keep happening. For good reason, the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day has been dubbed “the 100 deadliest days” for teen drivers.

Research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety concluded that drivers aged 16 and 17 are three times as likely as adults to be involved in a deadly crash. Beyond being inexperienced behind the wheel, the teens are prone to becoming distracted — especially if one or more kids ride as passengers — and to not wearing seat belts (both Lorena and Amada wore theirs) and to driving too fast.

For the sake of our teenagers, and of everyone who shares the roads with them, our public and family discussions of crashes like the one that killed Amada and Lorena must go far deeper than how tragic and unfair they are and what the road conditions were.

We all know that for teens to be driving to and from an end-of-school party at night in a heavy, powerful car like a Mercedes is an intrinsically perilous situation. Some very tough questions must be asked:

Did Lorena’s license allow her to drive after dark with a fellow teen as a passenger? How long had she been driving? Who does the Mercedes belong to, and if it was loaned to Lorena, what was the agreement for her use of the vehicle?

Whether Lorena was driving under the influence is an essential question that lab tests will seek to answer.

It seems harsh to bring up such things so soon after two young people died so horrifically on Golf Course Drive. But there may be no better time for the community to examine why such crashes happen and how they might be avoided, and for parents of teens to consider honestly whether and how often they give in and allow their kids to take the car when their guts tell them the answer should have stayed “no.”

Kids are just kids — until they shift a car into drive and head off down the road. Then, immutable laws apply to them the same as to everyone else — and cut them no slack because they’re young.

Chris Smith is a retired reporter and columnist for The Press Democrat. He lives in Santa Rosa. He can be contacted at csmith54@sonic.net.

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