Downey No Text & Drive Club shares OMG message

One teen driver has put down her phone and taken up the “No Texting” banner, alerting her classmates to a danger worse than the Islamic State, cancer and drive-by shootings combined.

“It almost seems unavoidable to be away from your phone. Growing up in this generation of technology, you feel like you can’t live without it. But the reality is, you can,” Downey High senior Hailey Hennigan said.

Hennigan founded the No Text & Drive Club at the Modesto campus and organized a chilling presentation by experts last week to drive home the point.

Distracted driving is as dangerous as drunken driving, but is often dismissed as no big deal, said nurse Rena Lepard, injury prevention coordinator for Doctors Medical Center.

“It’s going to take changing culture,” Lepard said, much like what it took to set minds against drunks behind the wheel. “Thirty years ago, drinking and driving was, hey, everybody does it,” she said. “We’ve got to get the word out there about distracted driving.”

Teen-driver crashes are the No. 1 cause of death for teens, California Highway Patrol Officer Eric Parsons told the group, most of them caused by distractions. “We think: ‘It’s not going to happen to me,’ ” Parsons said, adding that laws are tightening on the all-too-common practice.

Texting, changing a playlist or checking GPS maps will all be illegal in California on Jan. 1 under an update to laws already forbidding texting while driving – and that includes while stopped at a traffic light, Parsons said.

Doctors Medical Center, the CHP and Impact Teen Drivers have teamed to get the word out. The presentation seen by a dozen Downey students Sept. 29 included a video and in-depth discussion about a crash involving four teens that killed a promising athlete and left another unable to walk. The other two had lesser injuries, but their lives changed forever, stressed David Aaronson, who works for the nonprofit.

“Every single person in that car is responsible,” he said. The driver was going too fast and not paying attention, but riders could have asked her to slow down or told their friends to buckle up, the assembled teens agreed.

The voice of experience also came to speak to the teens. Maria Coyner of Stockton told of the few seconds she glanced down to read a text from her boyfriend, long enough to hit and kill a pedestrian she never saw.

Having completed her sentence, she is trying to get her life back on track. But finding a job as an ex-con with years of missing history is very difficult, she told the students. Even meeting new people is hard, and she worries she will forever be judged by her one mistake.

“I have this life because of nobody other than myself, because I chose to text and drive, and I’m not going to wake up some morning and say, ‘Wow! That was such an awful nightmare. I’m so glad that’s not my life.’ Because it is my life,” Coyner told the teens.

Though no longer compelled to do community service, Coyner said she continues to go to schools and community groups to tell her story.

For Hennigan, the push against texting and driving is also personal. It was a cause she shared with her father, the founder of the nonprofit Text Free Zone, before Ward Hennigan’s death in April.

His death, she said, spurred her forward. “It made me more passionate about making this club a bigger deal this year, and spread the word about texting and driving – trying to make it big,” she said.

This story was originally published October 3, 2016 at 3:32 PM with the headline "Downey No Text & Drive Club shares OMG message."