Mother promotes statewide emergency contact database

Delays are not acceptable, the woman said.

COLUMBUS (AP) — It took seven hours for police to notify Linda Wuestenberg that her son had been in a car accident and was critically injured. By the time she got to the hospital, he was dead.

The notification last year was hampered because her son, Steven Burge, lived alone and had a different last name from his mother, who had remarried.

Wuestenberg took her frustration to the state Legislature, which passed similar bills this month that would create a state database of emergency contacts that police could use to notify family members or friends of an accident involving a loved one.

Delays are unacceptable, said Wuestenberg, who lost the chance to spend time with her son during his final moments.

“We’ll never get it back,” she said in an interview with The Delaware Gazette. “He was just laying in the hospital, all by himself. We didn’t know how he felt, if was he scared.”

Other states, including Florida, have some sort of system allowing drivers to provide emergency contact information to law enforcement agencies or public safety officials.

The Ohio proposal would allow people to place the names and phone numbers of friends or relatives on file with the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Registration in the program would be made at the time a person applies for a driver’s license or online at a secure Web site. Participation would be voluntary and free.

Once the Legislature sends Gov. Ted Strickland a final version of the bill, he intends to sign it into law, spokesman Keith Dailey said.

Wuestenberg said she contacted sheriff’s offices in all of Ohio’s 88 counties about the emergency contact plan and found widespread support.

For her, the measure is an important step in a campaign that includes ParentGrief, a nonprofit organization co-founded by her sister, LuAnn Grover of nearby Delaware, to help grieving families and to encourage companies to provide better bereavement policies for employees.

Grover’s 5-year-old grandson died in a traffic accident in 2004. Two years later, the boy’s father — and Grover’s son — was still struggling to cope with the loss when he died from an accidental drug overdose.

Many companies have standard bereavement polices of three to five days, and that’s just not enough, Grover said.

“You can’t even have a funeral in that amount of time,” she said. “Even if you do get that scheduled, you’re going back to work the next day.”

The sisters — two moms who have lost their children — are trying to be pillars of strength in a family that’s endured a lot of tragedy in such a short time frame. They also had a cousin who was killed in an accident at work.

Their advocacy work helps them cope.

“It gives you something positive to turn to in these horrible tragedies we’ve had to face,” Wuestenberg said.