Mock crash warns students of drunk driving’s dangers

By Jean Reid Norman

Thursday, March 19, 2009 | 6:39 p.m.

Betty Fragoso cried when she wrote her daughter Ali's obituary.

It took Terri Quintero three tries to write the final words for her daughter Nadia.

They and the parents of 18 other Liberty High School students came to the school, 3700 Liberty Heights Ave., about noon Thursday to watch their children die, virtually anyway, in a program designed to dramatize the dangers of drinking and driving.

"I've been crying since she said she wanted to do it," Betty Fragoso said. "She wanted to make an impression on her peers."

In the Every 15 Minutes program, Henderson police staged a head-on car crash on Bermuda Road outside the school and recruited students to act out the parts of a drunken driver in one car and a driver and two passengers in the other.

As senior Ali Fragoso, her face made to look bloody, lay eyes closed in the front seat of a white Pontiac LeMans, her mother sat nervously with her older daughter Stephanie Diaz in the center of the front row of temporary bleachers set up on Bermuda Road. Diaz' daughter Meaghan Fragoso, a Liberty freshman, sat behind them.

Diaz said she wasn't sure she was ready for what she was about to see.

"I don't think you can ever be ready," she said.

Nadia Cedillo-Quintero, a senior and Ali Fragoso's best friend, was in the back seat, and friend Joseph Babitz lay across the crumpled hood of the car, a red stain spilling from his face to the white paint.

"It's not something you want to think about, especially with a young child," Quintero said about her daughter's "death."

As students filled in the bleachers, sophomore Carlos Maldonado peered at the scene.

"Who's in there? Students from here?" he asked his friends. "She's alive, right?"

The schools' juniors and seniors had not been told what was about to happen. They had just been instructed to go to the bleachers.

Across speakers set up for the occasion, a screech and crashing noise burst out followed by a dispatch call. Two motorcycle officers drove up to the scene, saw the bodies and called for backup.

Two uniformed officers, one of them the son of Liberty Principal Rosalind Gibson, narrated the events for students, noting there was one confirmed fatality at the site.

"Our concern here is for the living," Officer Roger Matuszak said. "The dead can wait."

Students in the bleachers winced.

As one officer pulled a partially consumed 12-pack of Busch Light from the back seat of a green Ford Taurus, Matuszak told students 22 percent of juvenile fatalities involve alcohol.

As firefighters prepared the Jaws of Life to pull Fragoso out of the front seat of the LeMans, students were told that most fatalities occur when people don't wear seat belts.

As Alexa Kelly was escorted from the Taurus to take a field sobriety test, they were told that 20 percent of teens involved in fatal DUI crashes have a blood-alcohol level of less than 0.08. Any measurable alcohol level is considered a DUI in drivers under 21 years old.

A medical helicopter arrived moments before the Clark County coroner's van and a Palm Mortuary hearse. Ali Fragoso was taken by helicopter to St. Rose Dominican Hospital's trauma center, where in the script she died. Babitz was taken to the county morgue.

Kelly, meanwhile, was handcuffed and taken to jail.

In real life, all of the students -- along with the 16 who were taken out of class, one at a time, in 15 minute intervals throughout the day to represent the toll of drunken driving -- were heading Thursday evening to a retreat, where they would participate in more activities to underscore the day's events. Their parents were to go to another gathering, where they were to write farewell letters to their children.

The junior and senior classes will gather again Friday in the Liberty gym for an assembly that in past programs has been tear-filled as the participants share their experience.

"We try to make this as realistic as possible," said Officer Michael Hull of the Community Relations Unit, who has been involved in the Every 15 Minutes program since the police department started it in 2001.

The student audience seemed to take the message seriously, Gibson said.

Taylor Fettkethrer, a senior whose sister was among the living dead, said the program hit home.

"It's pretty mind-blowing," he said. "I know most of these people. Watching it was kind of emotional."

Junior Nicole Smith said, "It's just so sad. I can't imagine what it would be like. I don't want to find out."