TEEN DRIVING: Honoring Rebekkah
SAFE-DRIVING CAMPAIGN AIMS TO PREVENT TRAGEDIES LIKE THE ONE THAT CLAIMED GWINNETT 16-YEAR-OLD
Bill Hendrick - Staff
Monday, January 8, 2001

It was half past midnight on a misty September morning when Daniel and Joni Evans saw every parent's nightmare rolling slowly into their driveway.

A police car.

Daniel Evans knew before they spoke that the grim-faced officers were bearing bad news. His heart pounding, he walked out to meet them.

''Your daughter has been involved in an accident, and I'm afraid I don't have very good news for you," one said. ''All four of the kids in the car passed away."

The Evanses' 16-year-old daughter, Rebekkah, had been driving a Mercedes-Benz that went out of control on a rain-slickened north Fulton County road, jumped the median and was hit broadside by a Jeep Cherokee. She was killed, along with her best friend and two teenage boys.

Memories of that night still haunt the Evanses. Joni Evans has a hard time even discussing it. But her husband has channeled his grief to ''honor my daughter," dedicating his life to keeping other parents from experiencing the horror he knows. He has signed on as a national spokesman and fund-raiser for the Marietta-based Safe America Institute, a nonprofit group dedicated to finding ways to make America a safer place for youngsters.

This month, Evans and Safe America President Len Pagano are launching a campaign that will include a call for tens of thousands of adult volunteers, who will ride with teenagers to help them gain at least 20 hours of chaperoned night-driving experience. Safe America will screen the volunteers and match them with youngsters who ask for the free training. The campaign will launch in the Atlanta area this month.

In addition to speaking to teenagers in schools and houses of worship, Evans, 40, says he'll use his career experience as an investment banker and venture capitalist to help raise $3 million to $5 million to help Safe America spread the word. The fund-raising effort is being dubbed "Rebekkah's Campaign."

''It's a way to give her life and the accident some purpose and meaning," Evans says. "While it was a personal tragedy for me to lose Rebekkah, it would be an even greater tragedy if I didn't turn her loss into something positive."

Safe America, founded in 1994, has been involved in a variety of programs to reduce teen traffic deaths. For example, thousands of Ohio youngsters are participating in Safe America's Safest Teen Driver contest, which involves written and on-the-road tests. The winner gets a new Honda Civic.

Last February, Safe America held a Youth Summit in Atlanta to train 100 teenagers to become peer leaders, to counteract peer pressure to consume alcohol and drive too fast. And the institute is passing out thousands of earpieces that will allow teenage --- and adult --- cellphone users to keep their hands on the wheel. Some 3,000 have been given away so far in metro Atlanta.

''The value of having Daniel Evans and his daughter Rebekkah involved is that it is a vivid, emotional reminder that we're dealing with an issue broader than just so-called reckless kids," Pagano says. ''It reminds us that we aren't just dealing with a drinking problem or a speed issue. We're dealing with inexperience."

Betty Siegel, president of Kennesaw State University, advises the institute on its teen-driving programs. She says Safe America's adult volunteers could play a key role in preventing accidents like Rebekkah's.

''You're not going to do this by passing laws," Siegel says. ''If you get adults involved, that's the key. The way to do that with very busy family lives is to recruit adults who have time. We think it's a great program, and it's an idea whose time has come."

Evans agrees. His daughter had at least as much driving experience as most teenagers, but she would have benefited from more.

On the night of Rebekkah's death, the Evanses were enjoying a normal evening at their Duluth home. Daniel was watching a Braves game on TV in his bedroom, Joni was surfing the Web in another room and their 13-year-old son was playing Nintendo upstairs.

At 11, Rebekkah missed her curfew. By 11:30, her parents' anger had turned to worry. Daniel paced while Joni peeked out the front window. At 11:45, they started calling parents of other teenagers. No one had heard anything.

After midnight, the police car appeared.

Daniel's first response was to try to contact his own parents, who live in the neighborhood. ''I went over to their house, literally standing at their front door, shaking." Then he remembered that they had left town to visit a relative.

So he returned home and called some friends, who came over right away. The police left, and the couple summoned their son. ''We brought our son, Bradlee, downstairs and told him. It's all kind of a blur," Evans recalls.

At 3:30 a.m., a woman from an organ-donor organization called. Rebekkah had wanted her organs to be harvested. ''I had no choice but to honor her wishes," Evans says. ''It was probably the most agonized phone call I ever had to participate in. There were times when I wanted to say, 'I need to go.' But I knew my daughter.

''They took everything they could: organs, eyes, tissues." Then the body was cremated.

''The last time we saw her she was leaving the house, happy, looking forward to going out to eat at Waffle House and then bowling," Evans recalls. ''That's the way I want to remember her."

The four young people in the car had met at the Evans home. Rebekkah didn't have a car of her own, so Evans had let her take his Mercedes, thinking that, at 4,000 pounds, it was the safest possible vehicle.

''There is a natural desire for every parent to understand what we could have done differently," he says. "I don't know what we could have done. She'd had a driver's training course. She had driven with us for a year and a half. She was an A-B student, had taken a Red Cross-certified baby-sitting course and had taken a CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) course. We had waited quite a while to let her get a license. She was very conservative, very careful."

Still, Evans believes that when it comes to teenagers driving, there's no such thing as enough experience --- especially in places such as Atlanta's suburbs, where roads that were two lanes a few years ago are now almost like expressways.

''We want kids to feel more comfortable behind the wheel," Evans says. "You ask, 'Could I have done more as a father? Could I have spent more time with her, driving?' Under her circumstances, it would not have changed the accident. But you always wonder."

Before Rebekkah's memorial service, hours after her best friend's funeral, the Evans home was filled with teenagers.

''You get a thousand stories you never know about your kid until afterwards," Evans says. "And they were all good stories, about her being loving and caring, about her not taking breaks when she could have as a lifeguard last summer. We thought about how she wanted to give her own money so a friend could go to Israel. That's the way she was. We're just so proud of who she was as a person."

He pauses, struggling with the memories. He continues, skipping ahead to Christmas --- Rebekkah's birthday.

"We chose not to be home. She loved Jimmy Buffett, and Joni's parents were in Key Largo, so the day after Christmas we went to Jimmy Buffett's restaurant down there and had a little celebration luncheon for her. It wasn't sad. What's sad is the loneliness, the void. But there is also some joy --- in our belief that she is in a much, much better place."

For information on how to volunteer to drive with Atlanta-area teenagers, to request a cellphone earpiece or take part in other teen-driving programs, contact Safe America at 770-218-0071 or visit www.safeamerica.org.

In 2000, teenage drivers in metro Atlanta were involved in accidents that took the lives of at least 32 teenagers. As a result, the Legislature this year will consider raising the driving age and other measures to reduce the toll.