A sobering reminder

Some of the different ways of becoming a distracted driver — eating while driving, turning around and talking to back-seat passengers and looking anywhere rather than the road in front of the car — were covered by Matt Logan when he talked to Nashua-Plainfield students last Wednesday.
But it was the most common form of distracted driving that changed Logan’s life forever as, at 8:51 p.m. on the first day of his daughter Deej’s senior year, she was pronounced dead.
She had been texting and driving when she collided with the back of a school bus.
“Wow, my daughter made a bad choice and it hurts me to say that,” said the Minnesota man. “That was a simple choice that changed everything.”
Making better choices is what Logan is trying to convince students to do as he tours gymnasiums like the one at Nashua, reliving over and over the events of that terrible day.
“I’m not here because this is a fun thing to do,” he said. “I want to give you this information.”
The father of four happened upon the accident on Sept. 4, 2012, unable to see the vehicle but telling the officer he knew his daughter was on the road between Rochester and Byron where the accident occurred.
“The officer came back and asked me for my driver’s license and I knew right then why he was asking. I watched Mayo 1 land on the road 1/4 mile ahead of me and airlift my daughter.”
One thing Logan was grateful for was the lack of injuries to the students on the bus, but there were so many things taken away from Deej.
“She was looking forward to her senior year. She had her prom dress picked out before school even started and she was setting money aside to pay for it. She’ll never again say good morning or good night to us, never laugh in the halls at school or feel the warm summer air again.”
Logan’s family was shocked to find out Deej had been texting and driving.
“She would talk about how bad that was, she would take the phone away from people. But I know she probably started checking messages only when she was stopped at a stop sign. She probably got comfortable with that and then got where she would write only going 30 miles per hour. Then maybe she got comfortable texting at straightaways.”
Among the tragic events that Logan talked about, he interspersed his program with a “Survivor” knockoff, placing 10 students on chairs and using applause from the student body to vote them off the “island” one by one. The final student, Levi Enright, was voted off by Logan himself.
There was a reason 10 chairs were empty at the end. On average, 10 people die in our country each day in accidents directly related to distracted driving.
 
For more of this article, see Thursday's Reporter or Friday's Tribune.

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