Eastridge High School seniors sat facing their auditorium stage, where there sat a simple wooden casket. Next to the casket was a white floral arrangement on a pedestal.
The class hadn’t lost a member of their class, but the point is that they might have. The students were assembled for a lesson on the dangers of drinking and driving, and the all-too real consequences.
“How would you feel if the person next to you is not going to be there tomorrow?” Paul Harris, of Harris Funeral Home, asked.
With prom season in full swing and graduation rapidly approaching, students are seeing mock DWI accidents and being reminded of the seriousness of drunk driving. Eastridge hosted its mock DWI May 13, coordinated by the Ridge Culver Fire Department and Irondequoit Police Department.
Two cars — the first with one student, the second with three students and an adult — “collide.” The first had been drinking, visibly intoxicated. A student runs crying to the collision, and police arrive. The fire department arrives, using the Jaws of Life to extricate an unconscious teenager. Pulse is taken, with no sign of life — and he’s removed from the vehicle and set aside, a fatality from a drinking and driving accident. His lifeless body lies on the cement in front of the hundreds of seniors, as firefighters and EMTs work to extricate and treat the remaining victims. A hearse rolls in to take the dead to the morgue, where parents will come to identify their child — an innocent victim of someone’s poor choice to drink and drive.
“This person is deceased, they’re gone,” Lisa Storer, of the Irondequoit Police Department, said to the crowd watching the theatrical, yet realistic, scene. “Their family’s life is affected, but the world still goes on. What don’t you get — this person is dead, their life is over.”
Two other students involved in the simulated crash were heard by the audience loudly crying, hysterical, as their friend was removed by funeral home officials.
“This is where you say your goodbyes to your friends,” Mike Napoli, captain of the Ridge Culver Fire Department, said.
Once the accident scene had been cleared, students returned inside to listen to Harris and Storer, as they described the process afterward — notifying parents, identifying the body and making funeral plans for a life cut short. Typically, parents will return to the Medical Examiner’s Office to identify the deceased.
