In the past few months I have written several times about the dangers of joyriding — teen driving with no particular destination or timetable — and how the presence of passengers on a joyride is a formula for peer pressure that leads to risky driving behaviors. Those of us who follow the headlines of teen driver crashes have seen this pattern, and its often fatal consequences, again and again, especially in 2013.
I have also written about a particular, recent teen driver crash that involved five teens in a car on a Saturday night. As always, I have no reason to embarrass those involved or make things more difficult for the families, but the fact is that we are all safer when we take the time to look at and understand examples of teen driving that resulted in tragedy. For this reason, and in this spirit, I offer the following excerpt from a news article about the police report on this crash. I have omitted the names, because the focus is the peer pressure, not the people involved or the location. The last line of the article sent a shiver down my spine; it gives a voice to one of our worst fears:
[The survivors] both told police that the SUV’s passengers urged [the teen driver] to go faster over the hill on the way back to the party, according to the warrant. [One passenger] told police that the radio was blasting, and that the SUV hit the bump and became airborne, then landed and veered into trees. She said she felt as though she had blacked out, and when she regained consciousness, she heard [the driver] screaming, the warrant says.
Police estimate that the 2003 Ford Explorer was going 84 to 90 mph at the time of the crash on a street where the speed limit is 30 mph. After hitting the bump in the road, it flew for about 100 feet before landing and going out of control, the warrant says.
The left front fender hit several trees, causing the vehicle to spin counterclockwise, and the passenger side then struck a large tree, and the vehicle spun clockwise and lifted off the ground, the warrant says. The back bumper struck a tree at a height of about 6 feet, and the SUV landed with the left front fender against a tree.
“Oh my God, I think I killed my friends,” [the driver] told residents of the area who heard the crash and rushed to help, the warrant says.
One of the residents described the crash as “never-ending,” according to the warrant. Another resident told police that she asked [the driver], who had gotten out of the SUV on her own, why she sped up.
[Her] response, according to the warrant, was: “They told me to. They kept telling me to go faster.”
