Amy Leonard sat alone at a table in the Olds Hospital and Care Centre cafeteria, unable to watch a simulated treatment of a patient with a spinal cord injury the next room over.She had just vacated a trauma room demonstration on May 1 at the hospital, one of the day's P.A.R.T.Y. (Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth) program events intended to show youth the consequences of impaired driving.For her, watching a girl strapped to a stretcher, pretending to cry for her mother while probed by a nurse's questions reopened old wounds.Last July, she was in a group returning from a party. They were driving home in two vehicles, with Leonard sitting in the lead one. Along the way, she noticed that her friends stopped following them.Leonard, now 19 and a graduate of the Olds College fashion marketing program, said the rear vehicle had rolled over in a ditch. They returned to the crash site, located east of Crossfield, but could not find the driver.“And then I heard my boyfriend scream at the top of his lungs because (it was) his best friend,” she said.“His friend was pinned under the truck. All you could see was his legs. They instantly (knew) there was no way he was alive.”Leonard said she was the only sober one in the group and called emergency responders.“And when they finally got there, they didn't even rush to help him, the driver, because they knew he was dead. So they just treated the girls in the accident and got statements from all of us,” she continued. “It was a long, long night. Worst night of my life.”The harrowing experience still haunts her.“To this day, I can't get in a vehicle without seatbelts; I can't sleep in a vehicle. When my little sisters go to parties, I can't sleep. It's almost a year later and I'm still very affected by it,” she said.Leonard was volunteering with the P.A.R.T.Y. program, helping her mother chaperone Grade 10 students from Olds High School. Her younger sisters were among those in attendance.The P.A.R.T.Y. program was a part of a lead-up to Crime Prevention Week at the school. The day's events were a collaborative effort between Olds High School, the Olds Fire Department, RCMP, emergency medical services (EMS), Chinook Arch Victim's Services, FortisAlberta, Olds College, Heartland Funeral Services and Torrock Towing.The first thing on the agenda that day was a mock car crash simulating one caused by a drunk driver.There was a buzz to start the morning as students filed into bleachers set up behind the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were out of class and in the beautiful morning weather, anticipating a spectacle.The mood turned in less than an hour, the chatter silenced with straight faces appearing across each row of the audience as police arrested the actress portraying the drunk driver and a woman wailed at a boy playing her dead son.That was the exact reaction organizers were aiming for, said Const. Dale Bereza of the Olds RCMP, one of the speakers during the presentation.“We want them to understand that albeit it's a mock collision, we want them to realize that this is about as real as it gets without it actually being real,” Bereza said. “So we want them to have a serious way of thinking about it.”Firefighters cut apart a damaged pickup truck piece by piece to free surviving passengers, who were loaded onto stretchers by EMS workers.The deceased boy was placed in a body bag and driven away in a funeral home van.In addition to the hospital visit, students followed the simulated collision with a trip to Heartland Funeral Services, where they browsed the selection of caskets and urns and toured the room where embalming takes place.The RCMP also presented at the funeral home, providing statistics on the frequency of collisions caused by impaired drivers along with pictures of the aftermath.According to Nicholas Taylor, one of the participating students, the day's events made him realize how collisions affect not just the victim's family and friends, but also emergency personnel and medical professionals. Those people also bear the emotional toll of fatalities.While watching the mock collision, Taylor, 15, said his classmates were visibly distraught.“I saw a lot of panic. They looked really, really uncomfortable,” he said. “Usually when you see it on the news or something, you still recognize it as being terrible but you don't actually have that personal connection with the person involved.”As a person whose life was rocked by impaired driving, Leonard said she hoped her sisters took the lessons equally seriously.Having watched a friend die in a collision, she added that everything students saw during the program was no exaggeration.“They weren't being dramatic. That's exactly how it is.”[email protected]
