A rock-and-roll singer who was once declared clinically dead had a powerful message on March 12 for grade 7 and 8 students at J.D. Hogarth Public School.
Robb Nash took off a week from his work with the rock band Live on Arrival to be part of a Mothers Against Drunk Driving presentation at the school, attended by well over 100 students.
Chantal Parkes, of MADD Canada, introduced the video, Dead on Arrival. The emotionally powerful presentation – a dramatization of several true stories – showed one young teen drinking, smoking pot and then taking off with four friends in a car. The resulting accident left him dead and his girlfriend paralyzed.
The video showed his parents in shock in the hospital, the sales presentation they had to endure when selecting a coffin and the shock of classmates. It concluded with the victim wishing for a second chance just as the first shovel of dirt hit his coffin, and all went black.
The video also showed a young engaged woman killed by a drunken driver and a young man who refused to get into a car after drinking, but was then killed by another drunken driver while walking home.
Parkes herself told students why she became involved with MADD. When she was 14 she awoke at 2:30am to screams coming from downstairs. They were from her family. Her father had been killed by a drunken driver.
Nash appeared in the video, and his band has written and performed a theme song for MADD Canada, called Another Second Chance. All the profits from that recording are being donated to MADD to help it get its message out.
Nash, too, was the victim of a drunken driver and admits he was foolish enough to get into the back seat with that driver, who swerved and struck a semi-trailer head on. Nash said the resultant crash tore the entire top off the car as it slid under the truck. He was pronounced dead at the scene, with no pulse and no heartbeat, and shocked ambulance attendants when he revived during the trip to the hospital morgue.
He spent months recovering, and the last thing he could remember before the crash was sitting in a classroom.
He said he finally woke up fourth months later, with “metal holding my skull together.” He said his biggest fear during that time was there would be a funeral for him and no-one would attend because he had not done anything special in his life to “make a difference.”
Until that crash, he admits he asked himself “Is drunk driving that big a deal?”
After finding the answer, he started working with MADD Canada, and remembered going through its offices and seeing pictures of victims of that crime. He saw five pictures of babies who had died after being hit by drunk drivers. Three of them were a day old and on the way home from the hospital.
Nash also had a powerful warning for the students about the choices ahead of them.
“In the next few years, you’re gonna have to make a lot of decisions,” he said. “You’ve got to be careful with these next few years.”
Nash said his business is music, and he likely sees more parties in a year than many see in a decade, but he promised never to get in a car with a drinking or drug taking driver, and never to drive that way himself.
He noted that at one school where the video was being show, several kids skipped out, one started drinking and took off in a car, and killed someone.
In an Edmonton high school, nine students had died in three years due to drinking and driving, and he realized he was speaking to a group where every single person in the audience knew someone killed by a drunken driver.
Nash told the students about groups like Ontario Students Against Impaired Driving (OSAID) and Teens Against Drunk Driving (TADD) and said he would support anyone in the school starting such a group.
Nash performed Another Second Chance for the student and concluded, “It would absolutely destroy me if one of you got into a car with a drunk driver and got killed after seeing this video.”
Parkes said that video, showed on three large screens, would be presented to over 600,000 students in Canada this year, and Nash would take weeks of time to visit students.
She said MADD is especially wanting to warn teens that they have some very difficult decisions to make, and to warn that sometimes in life there are no second chances for acting irresponsibly.
The MADD presentation was sponsored by the school and Wellington County’s chapter of MADD. Several police officers are members of that board, and Sergeant Mike Ashley and Constable Mark Cloes were both in attendance for the presentation.
Principal Katrina Plazek said in an interview the next day that students indicated they had talked with parents that night about what they had seen and she said opening lines of communication is a good thing.
She agreed that the video was intense, but noted parents were told in advance, and “For kids, it’s a visual to remember when faced with that decision” about riding with a drinking or drugged driver.
She said physical education teacher Tara Bilton worked with the MADD chapter in Wellington County to bring the presentation to the school.
