Texting and posting on Facebook is the ticket to death. Seconds before her fatal crash, Courtney Ann Sanford, a South Carolina driver, posted to Facebook, “The happy song makes me HAPPY.” She was referring to the Pharrell Williams hit song.
And now her life is over because it seemed important to text friends about how the song made her feel. Her text posted at 8:33 a.m. By 8:34 a.m. her life was over.
It was a Thursday during the last week of April and just an ordinary day for Sanford. She was headed to work driving 45 mph northbound in her 2005 Toyota Corolla on Business I-85 in High Point, S.C. Sanford apparently was in a good mood and posted a couple of selfies. She wasn’t drunk or high. The young woman with her life ahead of her was just driving and texting.
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As she posted about her happiness, the distracted Sanford swerved across the median line into the southbound lane and crashed head-on into a truck. Luckily the driver of the 2011 Kenworth truck, John Wallace Thompson, 73, was not hurt, but Sanford’s car burst into flames. And now she is dead.
It is chilling to think how easily this could happen to anyone. It could’ve been you or your friend bopping along to the radio and typing a text. No matter how frightening and graphic public service announcements are, people, especially teens, keep ignoring them. I scoured the web looking for one that best drove the point home.
Watch video:
If the above video didn’t scare the shit out of you, maybe the threat of legal consequences will get through to you.
Watch this video:
Texting while you’re driving involves the same type of denial as, “Aw, smoking is no big deal.” Watching that horrid anti-smoking commercial of the woman who has had most of her fingers amputated due to smoking should make you quit. Or, have you seen the one of the man coughing and wheezing and lying in a hospital bed? Go ahead, have another cigarette.
Don’t be a moron. Here are the sobering stats of texting while driving:
- 1,600,000 accidents per year (National Safety Council)
- 330,000 injuries per year (Harvard Center for Risk Analysis Study)
- 11 teen deaths every day (Institute for Highway Safety Fatality Facts)
- Nearly 25 percent of all car accidents (OnlineSchools.com)
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Texting while driving is six times more likely to cause an accident than driving while intoxicated. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration says that texting while driving is equal to driving after four beers. Texting is now the number one driving distraction reported by teen drivers.
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According to the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, texting while driving is equal to driving with your eyes closed for five seconds at a time. To understand what that means, imagine driving across the length of a football field with your eyes closed.
