LINCOLN, Maine — Tayla Trask stood on a podium before an almost full Mattanawcook Academy gymnasium Friday enduring one of the most surreal and heartrending experiences a person can have: She was alive and attending her own funeral.
Before her were arrayed hundreds of her family, friends, classmates and teachers, and the 19-year-old senior was supposed to thank members of her family for loving words spoken minutes before in praise of her, and for the tears they had shed in her honor.
Inevitably, her own tears came. Trask endured it all, she said, because she wanted to help her classmates avoid the horrific consequences of teenage drunken driving.
“I am friendly with a lot of people in school,” Trask said afterward. “I am pretty sure that it would make a difference to at least a few people if I ‘died.’”
Friday’s mock funeral for Trask and fellow senior Matthew Guiod was the culmination of the nationally recognized program “Every Fifteen Minutes.” As part of the two-day effort, Lincoln’s firefighters and other public safety workers took participating juniors and seniors through every step of a typical fatal motor vehicle accident involving drunken drivers.
The suspect in the OUI mishap, which also injured two students, was “charged” with two counts of vehicular manslaughter and held overnight in jail before being “arraigned” in court in Bangor. The victims were pulled from the wreckage of their accident on Thursday and treated by paramedics as their parents stood by and the Rev. Mike Robinson delivered a eulogy as part of the funeral.
Trask said that the emotional force of the re-enactment began to hit her as she played her role in the mock accident Thursday and later coached her mother through the eulogy her mother was writing.
Robinson and Lincoln Fire Chief Phil Dawson told the students that the reality they and the school’s staff worked so hard to illustrate was usually created by one thing — a decision to drink and drive — and that this decision spawns myriad tragedies for all touched by it.
Dawson related how often he is reminded today of a horrible accident scene he went to as a Maine state trooper 31 years ago. Fewer OUI incidents occur today than when “Every Fifteen Minutes” was launched, but distracted drivers — people texting on cell phones or doing their makeup while driving — are filling the void, he said.
“You could say that this [OUI incident] is another form of distracted driver,” Dawson said.
Parents and other authority figures might seem overbearing to teenagers with their rules and punishments, Robinson said, yet their goal is to keep students from becoming statistics like those whose lives are ended every 15 minutes.