Teen’s friends turn tragedy into campaign for seat belts

By Kyle B. Hansen

Saturday, Nov. 20, 2010 | 2:05 a.m.

Monica Mapile would have turned 19 years old Friday, but instead of getting ready to celebrate, her friends spent the day at church and at a tow-yard news conference to talk about seat belts.

“We should be getting ready to go out, but we’re here,” said friend Capri Barnes.

Mapile wasn’t wearing a seat belt March 4 when she was killed in a crash at Blue Diamond and Fort Apache roads. Now her friends have started a high-tech campaign to help keep other people from making the same mistake.

They said they realized teenagers and young adults don’t always listen to adults. They don’t even listen to lectures from their friends. But they do use social media to find out what cool things their friends are doing.

“We’re on Facebook, MySpace, that’s all we do,” Barnes, 19, said.

So Mapile’s friends and family set up a nonprofit foundation, the Monica Mapile Foundation, and have launched a campaign with the slogan “Friends that click together stick together.”

They’re asking people to take photos of themselves and the passengers in their car wearing their seat belts — before the car is in motion — and upload them to the foundation’s website or Facebook page.

From there, the photos are often seen by the seat belt wearer’s friends, so people who upload photos are setting a good example for others.

Just more than a month after starting, the group’s Facebook page has nearly 900 “likes,” the group has started going to traffic safety events and is getting ready to speak to driver’s education classes.

Some of the group’s online followers are from other countries.

“This could be a national thing. It could be a worldwide thing, because seat belts help everybody,” Barnes said.

The group already has a success story. A girl who uploaded a photo was hit by a drunken driver on Halloween weekend but was wearing a seat belt and was not injured.

“In this town, there’s so many people who drive crazy. If your seat belt is the thing that saves your life and it takes 30 seconds to put it on, who’s not going to do that?” Barnes said.

Friday’s news conference was to help announce that valley law enforcement agencies are planning extra patrols next week to watch for people not wearing seat belts while traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Officers from Metro Police, Henderson Police, Boulder City Police and the Nevada Highway Patrol participated in the event and have received a grant to help pay for the extra enforcement.

The enforcement will be paired with local and national “Click-it-or-ticket” TV ads over the next week.

Nevada does not have a primary seat belt law, so while drivers and passengers are required to be buckled up, a police officer cannot pull someone over just for not wearing a seat belt.

But that doesn’t stop the campaign, officials said. Police officers said they will use any minor offence — not signaling for a lane change, having something hanging from the review mirror or having window tint that is too dark, for instance — as probable cause for a traffic stop.

Passing a primary seat belt law, meanwhile, remains a top priority for law enforcement officials.

The Monica Mapile Foundation will be working on the issue, Mapile’s friends said, and will be joined by others who have lost loved ones.

Brian and Tina LaVoie “belong to a club that no one wants to belong to,” Brian LaVoie said.

The Las Vegas couple’s 18-year-old daughter was killed in a Sept. 26 crash when she wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

They are also trying to set up a foundation in their daughter’s name, and “the No. 1 thing we want right now is to pass a primary seat belt law,” Tina LaVoie said.

“I will be spending the spring in Carson City, and I will talk until I can’t talk anymore,” Brian LaVoie said. “I will not stop until there is a primary seat belt law in Nevada.”