I got one of those calls you never want to get, but soon realized it would not be the worst call that night.

My sister called crying hysterically, to which I assumed meant the worst. She quickly reassured me that she was fine but wanted me to come pick her up. My family all hopped in the car and soon found ourselves at a terrible accident scene. Finally getting the story, we realized that a car in oncoming traffic which was drag-racing another car, side-swiped the car directly in front of my sister forcing her to swerve into opposite lane, luckily unoccupied at this point.

My first thoughts were purely journalistic instinct. “We need to get a reporter out here to cover this.”

I thought to myself how callous this sounded. When had I become one of those reporters who only cared about getting the scoop? I wrestled with this thought of wondering how I had slipped into this mindset. But then I realized I didn’t just want to tell people what happened but wanted to warn them.

The other half of the story that I haven’t told you yet was something I knew needed to be voiced.

The reason my sister had been crying was because of what she saw. On impact both cars fell to pieces and from the car that had been hit, she saw the driver’s body fall limply halfway out of the window.

The lifeless body was enough to tell her that she had just seen this man’s life end before her eyes. After more ambulances and a police report, we found out all four people in the car died. At that point I realized that these people’s friends and family still thought everything was fine until they would get that fatal call that night.

Two people did live, however, the driver and the passenger of the other car involved in the wreck. I don’t know which would be the lesser of two evils: losing my life having done nothing wrong or living 60 more years with the guilt of ending the lives of four 20 year olds.

If you want to escape this, find a nice big hole in the ground to hide in and don’t expect to come out anytime soon, because these things happen everyday. We just don’t notice them until we see how it affects our own life.

And I can tell you that the image of that man limply falling out of that car is forever burned into my sister’s memory.

I don’t think we would be doing anyone justice by not letting the public know what reality is like. We got home from the wreck just in time to catch the local news coverage and to be honest, I didn’t think it had done the wreck any justice.

Saying that there were four fatalities didn’t give the same impact that being there had been. And heading straight to the news about college football didn’t seem like an ending these four deserved.

I don’t want to be a callous reporter who hounds a grieving widow until she’s so broken down that the only answer is to talk; I want give that widow a voice to encourage others. 

I have seen enough Oprah episodes to know that people who go through tough experiences come on the show to help others cope and warn them from making the same mistakes. We all have a way to benefit this world and I think reporting is mine. 

 

Valerie Metrejean is a senior journalism major and serves as associate editor for The Tech Talk. E-mail comments to vmm008@latech.edu.