Saved by the belt

By SEAN BARRON

news@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Andrew Lucas likely won’t forget what proved to be anything but a recent routine drive home.

“A few weeks ago, I was on my way home after work at the YMCA in Youngstown. I was on [Interstate] 680 and a car merged in front of mine,” the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center 11th-grader remembered. “I flipped two or three times and landed on my wheels. It’s a miracle I landed like that.”

You might be tempted to view as a miracle the fact that Lucas, 17, walked away relatively unscathed with little more than whiplash. But ask the teen about how he survived the terrifying experience, and he’ll probably tell you it was the result of something he had taken mere seconds to do beforehand: buckling up.

“A seat belt saved my life,” Lucas said while sharing his story during a news conference Sunday at the Four Seasons Flea & Farm Market, 3000 McCartney Road on the East Side, to kick off a Click It or Ticket campaign.

The effort runs today through June 2 to remind drivers to always wear seat belts. That’s especially critical during the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, which typically sees an increase in the number of vehicles on the road, noted Susan Viars, project director with the National Safety Council Ohio Chapter.

Also on hand to get the message out were the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Department and members of the Beaver Township, Canfield, New Middletown and Jackson Township police departments.

Another strong advocate for seat-belt use is David Moore, a paramedic with the Green Township Fire Department, whose daughter, Jenifer Moore, was in a major car accident about 12 years ago in Columbus.

As he spoke during the press conference, Moore stood near a blown-up photograph of Jenifer, then 19, standing next to her mangled new 2007 Chevrolet Cobalt. While getting on Interstate 71 in rush-hour traffic to return from Columbus State College to her apartment, she struck and somehow got wedged under a flatbed trailer, which sheared off much of the front of her vehicle, including the top of the engine, he explained.

Despite the severe vehicle damage, she came away with mere scratches and cuts from broken glass, an emotional David Moore recalled.

“She was belted, which saved her life. Otherwise, she could have been decapitated,” said Moore, who also teaches driver’s-education courses and other programs for the National Safety Council. “We replaced the car, but I have my loving daughter with me the rest of my life.”

Madonna Chism Pinkard, the community-relations director for 21 WFMJ-TV, The Vindicator’s broadcast partner, vividly recalled having lost her father in an accident 13 years ago, which also caused her to be ejected from the car and tossed about 40 feet onto pavement. Neither was wearing a seat belt, but three others in the vehicle who were buckled up “were absolutely fine,” she remembered.

“It was one of the most terrible and harrowing things I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Chism Pinkard said, adding that she also suffered a broken neck and back, for which she was hospitalized about 45 days.

The life-altering event made her a staunch advocate for wearing seat belts, partly “because I learned the hard way,” she continued.

Sgt. Shaun Baskerville of the highway patrol’s Canfield Post noted that about 1,300 seat-belt citations have been issued in Mahoning County so far this year, which is significantly fewer than the 1,885 that had been written by this time last year.

“Education and awareness are huge factors in reducing the number of fatal crashes and in seat-belt compliance,” Baskerville surmised.

A ticket for a seat-belt violation, which is a secondary traffic offense in Ohio, is usually about $100, he noted.

But for people such as Andrew Lucas, you could say that wearing the device is priceless.

“I still can’t wrap my mind around it,” Lucas said about the way he survived a potentially catastrophic accident merely by having buckled up.