Parent’s Group Promotes Safe Student Travel Abroad

Had he lived, Aron Sobel would be just starting his residency in internal medicine at Boston University Medical Center.

Handsome, outgoing, athletic and intellectually gifted - an honors graduate of the University of Maryland and a member of Phi Beta Kappa - the 25-year-old Sobel died in a highway bus accident in Turkey on May 3, two weeks before he was to graduate from medical school.

“He was a wonderful boy,” said his mother, Rochelle Sobel of Potomac, Md. “He had everything going for him except luck.”

After investigating the circumstances of her son’s death, she said, one of her conclusions is that luck is something everyone traveling the roads of Turkey may need. “My son’s death was a preventable tragedy,” she said. “He was a victim of gross negligence.”

Rochelle Sobel said she wants to pay tribute to her son’s memory by helping to prevent the deaths of other young people traveling in countries where traffic fatalities are common.

With her husband, Dr. Solomon Sobel, she has started the organization American Parents for Safe Student Travel Abroad, which will try to alert Americans - particularly younger travelers to the Third World - to dangerous road and driving conditions overseas and bring pressure on governments to improve roads, enforce traffic regulations and raise driving standards.

Like many other developing countries, Turkey has a high but little-publicized traffic fatality rate. The American embassy in Turkey reports that the traffic accident death rate is six times that of the United States, with an average of 12 deaths annually for every 10,000 vehicles. The International Road Federation, a road-building industry organization that lobbies governments to improve highways, ranks Turkish roads second in Europe only to Latvia’s in danger.

Vacationing in Turkey after a period of training at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, Sobel was killed - along with 22 others, including several European tourists - when the bus he was in went out of control on a sharp curve of the Bodrum-Izmir highway and fell about 50 feet into a ravine. According to newspaper reports, passengers had been pleading with the driver to slow down just before the accident, which happened at a notorious “curve of death” where there have been other fatal accidents. Survivors said the bus was also on the wrong side of the road and skidded on wet pavement when the driver swerved suddenly to avoid oncoming traffic.

Sobel’s camera was undamaged in the accident and was returned to his parents with the rest of his luggage. Among the photos on the roll of film in the camera was the last one taken of him. It shows a smiling Sobel holding the guidebook he used to plan his trip: “Let’s Go: Greece and Turkey,” one of the best-selling series of budget- and studentoriented travel guides produced by a subsidiary of the Harvard Student Agencies.