Written by AARON CASTREJON CityWatch Editor WEST COVINA - Two students were killed outside West Covina High School Tuesday in a drunk driving crash -- but the students will be just fine. The mock collision was planned as part of a two-day event with the Every 15 Minutes Program, which challenges high school juniors and seniors to consider the grave realities of DUI driving and its impact on the victims and their family and friends. The mock collision was conducted by the West Covina Police Department, California Highway Patrol, West Covina Fire Department, the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner and a host of volunteers, which includes Custer Christiansen Mortuary in Covina. The mock collision took place on Cameron Avenue near the high school. A mock procedure was conducted with the students being transported to a nearby hospital where they later died. The suspected DUI driver, a West Covina High student, was even jailed, according to Officer David Sifling of the West Covina Police Department. Organizers selected some students from West Covina High School to take part in the program, which will include drunk driving demonstrations and a slideshow delivered by a local trauma surgeon showing people injured and killed in DUI collisions, Sifling said. The students will be secluded at a hotel with little to no contact with family and friends. The students will write letters to their parents.
“The letter will start off ‘Every 15 minutes, someone loses their lives to DUI and today I lost mine and I never got to tell you’,” Sifling said. The juniors and seniors will meet again for an assembly at West Covina High School Wednesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. A casket will be rolled into the assembly, followed by “the living dead” students killed in the mock crash. A compilation video fo the two-day event will be shown, highlighting the major events from the crash to the arrest of the DUI driver. “A select few of them will read their letters in front of the students and that’s when the heartbreaking stuff starts happening,” Sifling said. Publicly expressing the shock and sorrow of going through a fatal DUI crash -- even a mock crash -- is still a reeling experience for the students, Sifling said. “The event makes a huge impact on everybody at the school,” Sifling said. |
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