NEW ORLEANS -- One year ago this week, Rachel Grafe, 19, died while sending a text message. She was driving on Highway 90 on the west bank when she lost control and plowed into a steel support.
“It was devastating. It was really devastating. She was 19, beautiful, in the prime of her life,” said Page Graham, Grafe’s aunt.
“And from the time of the 911 calls, there was a text on her phone at that time,” Graham explained.
Grafe’s car hit the steel support so hard that the impact bent it. Now her roadside memorial shows a year of weathering.
“It's hard. There's not a day goes by that I don't think about her, that I don't miss her,” Graham said. She will tell her niece's story to the Fontainebleau students.
“She had the world at her fingertips and in one brief moment, lost it all,” Graham said.
A national study shows 89 percent of citizens would like to see a ban on sending text messages while driving. The practice is already illegal in Louisiana, but studies also show that more people do it now than ever before, and young people are the worst offenders.
“Just driving around on the roadway, you see it everywhere,” said Trooper Nick Manale of Louisiana State Police. “You see everybody has that phone in front of their face, and they're distracted behind the wheel of that vehicle.”
Louisiana is one of 16 states with a law against texting while driving. The fine for a first offense is up to $175. But that doesn’t seem to stop most drivers.
“It's easy. It's quick. You don't have to get on the phone,” said Christina Donze, who is a member of what she calls the texting generation. When she and her group of fellow nursing students were assigned a community service project, they decided to tackle texting.
The nursing students actually sat outside high schools in St. Tammany and Tangipahoa parishes, watching student drivers for cell phone use. The school with the worst problem, they found, was Fontainebleau High School north of Mandeville.
“They're looking down. Some of them, you can tell, they hold it low, so they have to completely look down to text, and some of them will hold it up on the steering wheel, so they're kind of looking above, but you can see their cell phone, plain as day,” said student Brittany Sessions.
The students called that their windshield survey. Based on the results, they decided to bring an intervention program to Fontainebleau. It started with a written survey.
“Our pre-survey showed that 80 percent text and drive, and 80 percent know it's dangerous,” said Donze.
“They do it, yet they think you shouldn't be able to. So that was surprising,” said student researcher Amanda Lusk.
Wednesday, the student group will speak to more than 1,100 Fontainebleau students, hoping to change behavior.
“Texting while driving is like driving with a .08 blood alcohol level,” explains Donze.
“When you text and drive, your reaction time is actually that of being legally drunk,” said Lusk. That's a nugget of info the students surveyed didn't know. Besides the stats, they'll also tell real stories of lives lost while texting.
“If we can get them maybe to start thinking, ‘I'm not invincible. This can happen to me.’” Christina Donze explained as a goal of the nursing students’ program.
The nursing students will tell high schoolers if they must text, they should do it at a red light or get a passenger to do it for them, and never do it in heavy traffic or in bad weather.
“They've even had aluminum signs made that they're going to leave at Fontainebleau High School, so that every time the students leave the campus, they're going to see a sign that says, about texting and driving,” said Southeastern nursing teacher Terry Compton.
“We know they're still going to do it, but we're just trying to, hopefully, make a little impact,” Lusk said.
The nursing students will take a post-intervention survey at Fontainebleau to see if their presentation made a difference, to get them to text less often and ultimately to prevent as many roadside memorials to crash victims as possible.
