On December 2, 2006, my seventeen-year-old son, Reid, the driver, died in a one-car accident. On a three-lane Interstate highway that he probably never had driven before, on a dark night just after rain had stopped, and apparently traveling above the speed limit, he went too far into a curve before turning, then overcorrected, and went into a spin. While the physics of the moment could have resulted in any number of trajectories, his car hit the point of a guardrail precisely at the middle of the driver's-side door, which crushed the left-side of his chest.

Reid's accident was a precursor to a string of horrific accidents in Connecticut. In August 2007, four teenagers, all residents of suburban towns west of Hartford, got into a car, headed home from a party in the town of Bristol. The car was what buffs call a high performance vehicle. As the driver, age nineteen, headed on a rural road toward the homes of his passengers – two teenage girls, one boy –he tried to execute a controlled skid through a turn. I am sure that such a move, properly executed by a stunt person on a closed track, is thrilling. Except this was not a controlled environment, and the car's speed was estimated by police at 140. When his car ran out of curve, he crashed and died, as did his three passengers, at a scene described by police as beyond their comprehension and experience. An elderly couple in an oncoming vehicle was severely injured.

Then in October, a seventeen-year-old tried to maneuver around a car hauling a boat trailer, did not get back in his lane quickly enough, and hit a truck in the opposite lane. He died, along with his fourteen-year-old sister and a fifteen-year-old friend of his sister's.

Reading news accounts of these accidents, I reflected more intently on how I had – or hadn't – controlled Reid's driving. These tragedies focused me – and indeed, our entire state – on the dangers of teen driving. I found myself alternately defending my own conduct, but then asking – well, if I did what I was supposed to, how did Reid end up dead? Comparing other accidents to Reid's, and other parenting to my own, allowed me to think that I had been a responsible parent. Reid had been driving a safe, sensible Volvo, not a race car. I had educated myself on Connecticut's teen driving laws, made sure Reid was aware of them, given him more than the required twenty hours of on-the-road instruction, enrolled him in a driving school, demanded that he always wear his seat belt, revoked his driving privileges when he had disobeyed our household's rules, and even twice confiscated his car for a week or more. Looking back, it did not seem that I had made some horrible, obvious mistake. So where did I go wrong? Or was I simply deluding myself? Would a stricter father's son still be alive?

In November 2007, Connecticut's Governor M. Jodi Rell appointed a Teen Safe Driving Task Force to revise and strengthen Connecticut's Graduated Driver Laws, and appointed me as one of the "bereaved parents" on that task force. In four months in early 2008, our Task Force rewrote Connecticut's rules from top to bottom, and the Governor signed Connecticut Public Act 08-32 into law on April 21, effective August 1, 2008.

While I was serving on this Task Force, I began to write a book about my experience as a father in the year after my son's death; not a self-help book but a memoir, a real-time retrospective about what a parent does day-by-day after the sudden and unimaginable passing of a teenager in an automobile accident. My writing coincided with my immersion in the work of the Task Force and eventually resulted in my coming face-to-face with the realization that teen driving is much more dangerous than I had recognized when I was teaching my son to drive and then supervising his first year as a licensed driver. Over time, my manuscript (presently being reviewed by potential publishers) evolved into a cautionary tale for parents of our country's twelve million teen drivers.

At this time, my book's working title is HIS FATHER STILL: A Parenting Memoir. (My literary agent is Joy Tutela (jtutela@dblackagency.com) of the David Black Literacy Agency in New York City. Copyright © Timothy S. Hollister, all rights reserved.) Click here for an excerpt from Chapter 14, "What I'm Feelin' Like, Dad Is to Borrow the Car Keys."

As a result of these experiences, safer teen driving has become my avocation.

• Safer teen driving starts with informed, conservative decisions about whether teens get behind the wheel of a car in the first place. Teaching teens to operate a vehicle safely is Step 2.
  
  
• Driving is the leading cause of death for people under age 20 in the United States.
  
  
• Safer teen driving is everyone's concern. In 2008, more than 2,700 teen drivers died in crashes, but their crashes killed more than 3,400 passengers, other drivers, and pedestrians.

Father of Reid S. Hollister, age 17, a driver, who died in the early morning of December 2, 2006, the result of a one-car accident on the evening of December 1, at Exit 34 on Interstate 84 East in Plainville, Connecticut.

Dear Readers: as some of you may have noticed, during the past six weeks I took some time away from regular posts on this blog. I wish I could say that I was relaxing on some beach or golf course, but I have been working on my book, His Father Still, and also doing some research for upcoming blog posts. Contrary to what some may think, these blogs do not write themselves, and some of the posts actually require some digging. The time has been productive. Upcoming on this blog is what will probabl...