Wednesday, March 3, 2004 | 11:26 a.m.
When Chase Curi wrote about his family's car accident in November 2002, he was just doing his homework.
He was 9 years old at the time and never expected the story to turn into a published book, much less one read by his peers during National Reading Week.
But when Erin Breen, director of the Safe Community Partnership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, read Chase's "The Legend of the Seat Belts," she immediately saw a great opportunity to teach the boy's peers to buckle up.
"It's a great way for us to get our message out," Breen said.
The story details how seat belts saved Chase's family from being hurt when a 16-year-old driver rear-ended the family's new sport utility vehicle.
The Safe Community Partnership turned Chase's third grade writing project into a book and distributed multiple copies to every elementary school in the district through the Clark County School District Partnership Office as a way to promote reading and safety, Breen said. The book was illustrated by UNLV student Rachel Ackeret with Japanese animation-style characters.
About 750 copies were distributed at a cost of about $1,500, but several schools have requested more, Breen said. Many kindergarten through second grade teachers have planned to read the book to their students.
The partnership is also promoting a professional book, "Mick Hart Was Here" to encourage middle school students to wear helmets when riding bicycles.
Chase, now a 10-year-old fourth grader at J. Marlan Walker International School in Henderson, is shy about his new fame as a published author, and when asked about his book says, "It's cool."
But he says he's glad other students will read his story if it helps remind them to wear their seat belt.
"It's really, really important," Chase said, "because if they didn't wear a seat belt and they got hit they could be seriously injured."
Seat belts often make the difference in whether a person suffers a serious injury or not, Breen said.
More than 70 percent of the people brought into the University Medical Center with trauma injuries from car accidents were not wearing seat belts, Breen said.
Unrestrained children are especially at risk of being hurt in a car accident, she said. Breen said children under age 6 or 60 pounds should be restrained in special child seats because regular seat belts do not fit them correctly. A new state law will make this mandatory in July.
Regular observational studies of local drivers show that about 78 percent of drivers in the Las Vegas Valley wear seat belts, but only about 63 percent have children between 2 and 4 years old properly restrained in child seats, Breen said.
And if adults in a car are not wearing their seat belts, children are usually not buckled up either, Breen said.
Breen said teaching kids to wear seat belts when they're younger often leads them to nag their parents to wear seat belts too, Breen said.
"It benefits the entire family," Breen said. "If we can convince a youngster to buckle up, the whole family will buckle up."
Chase and his family know the value of that. Chase, his parents and his little brother, 7-year-old Colin, were on their way to breakfast on Nov. 11, 2002, when they were hit.
The family was stopped at a construction site on Horizon Ridge Parkway in their 2-week-old Acura MDX when they heard a "loud squealing sound" behind them, Chase said.
"Bang! A Grand Prix smashed the family's black, new, shiny SUV," Chase writes in his book. "The family felt an extremely large hit. It smelled like burned rubber from the tires of the other car. The mother and father flung forward, but didn't fly out the window. The kids just fell forward a little bit. Their seat belts were on safely. Without their seat belts, they would have got hurt really bad."
The driver who hit them had minor injuries, but his car was totaled, Chase's mom, Julie Curi said. The family's SUV took three months to repair.
Chase said the accident and the damage to the car did not phase him. He was just glad "everyone was safe."
"Cars don't really have lives, they are just pieces of metal," Chase said. "But people do. If a person dies it's bad, but if a car dies it's not."
Chase, an A/B honor roll student, wrote about the accident a week later after he had been studying Native Americans in his third grade classroom. The class had been reading Native American legends, and his teacher asked students to write their own legend as a writing project.
Chase said he decided to write about the accident for several reasons: it was fresh in his mind; he knew others who had been in accidents, and his mother had lost a sister in a car accident when she was a teenager.
"I was so excited when he chose to write about this," Julie Curi, a learning strategist at Charles A. Silvestri Middle School, said. "I want all families to know it can happen to them."
In her excitement, Julie Curi showed the story to a school counselor at Silvestri, who turned out to be Breen's sister.
"It's just kind of a fluke that it ended up a book, but it's a good message," Curi said.
Julie Curi says Chase has inspired her to write more.
"I'm supposed to be the author in the family," Curi said. "I always said I was going to write books, but my kid beat me to it. I'm glad he's excited about writing in fourth grade."
Both Curi and Breen said younger students are more likely to buckle up after reading a book by a fellow student.
"Kids are more affected by their peers than by adults," Julie Curi said.
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