Truth About Consequences Of Driving Drunk
A mother’s grief. A young man’s remorse. A tough cop’s tears…
The anguish of “A Wake Up Call” pours off the screen like waters from a burst dam. The words stab the heart like the twisting of a knife.
No actors appear in this 23-minute video about the consequences of drinking and driving. What you see on screen is painfully true.
Created by Lon Gibby Productions, “A Wake Up Call” premiered Tuesday night in Gibby’s north Spokane studio.
It didn’t attract the festive crowd one expects at an opening night performance.
Tears outnumbered applause, with good reason. Everyone in the room had been touched in some way by impaired driving.
“That’s my granddaughter,” whispered the elderly woman sitting next to me in the dark.
The snapshot centered on the screen was of a pretty blonde girl in her early teens. She stood in a vegetable patch wearing a brown sweater and an uncertain smile.
Alicia Easterwood.
Her short life ended Nov. 2, 1997. Easterwood and two other teens died in a one-car crash. The driver, James Vreen, was driving 40 mph over the speed limit when he lost control on a Peaceful Valley street.
Though not legally drunk, the alcohol in him arguably contributed to his recklessness. Last September, Vreen, 20, was sentenced to more than seven years behind bars for the deaths.
“If kids can just get a sense of how precious they are and how precious life is,” said Alicia’s mom, Marilyn Darilek, in the film.
Shooting and editing this video, said Gibby, was one of the most difficult projects he has ever done. “We didn’t want it to be a lecture,” he explained. “It’s powerful because it’s real.”
“A Wake Up Call” was funded by a grant from the Greater Spokane Substance Abuse Council. Linda Thompson, the organization’s director, hopes airing it to students and at various meetings will change behavior and save lives. KXLY-TV will show “A Wake Up Call” Dec. 27 at 1:30 p.m.
Even Thompson’s connection to this is excruciatingly personal. Her 3-year-old son, Trevor, was killed by a drunken driver in 1986.
No one could watch this without being deeply affected.
“A Wake Up Call” suffers some from an erratic and intrusive musical soundtrack as well as too many gimmicky graphics and sound effects. But the devices, though distracting, don’t cloud the honesty expressed by the subjects.
Brian, a former college baseball prospect, spoke openly about the bad choices that killed his best friend and left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair.
The guilt Brian feels is palpable. One Sunday, he coaxed the friend into disobeying his mother and taking a ride with a driver who had been drinking. “He should have listened to his mother and stayed home,” Brian said somberly, “but I pressured him into it.”
The eyes of Spokane police Officer Harry Kennedy, a 24-year veteran, filled with tears as he described a horrific drunken driving crash: On Memorial Day 1996, Julie Allen, 14, and Karen Sederholm, 26, were slaughtered when a drunken fool named James Barstad gunned his truck through the intersection of Mission and Hamilton and barreled into three cars.
A judge gave Barstad 50 years. It wasn’t enough.
“I’m a lot more emotional than I used to be,” Kennedy, who attended the premiere, said after the screening. Seeing so much needless death “takes a toll on you.”
Getting behind the wheel after drinking is more socially taboo than it was, say, 20 years ago.
But it still happens far too often. DUI tickets are still routinely plea-bargained to lesser offenses. Sentences for drunken drivers are routinely too light.
We really do need “A Wake Up Call.”
“I hope it makes a difference to one person,” said Candy Sanders, who suffered severe spinal injuries when her car was rammed by a drunken driver in Florida. “The guy who hit me said he just stopped off for a couple of beers.”