Concern Grows as Teens Die In Crashes
Parents, Officials Talk Seat Belts, Rethink Curfews

By Daniel de Vise and Mary Otto
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 22, 2007; B01

A rash of fatal car wrecks involving teenage drivers in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia is prompting parents to revisit safe driving rules and lawmakers to urge stronger enforcement of laws that might have prevented some of the deaths.

Ten teens have died on the roadways of suburban Maryland and Virginia in the past two weeks. Three more were hospitalized Tuesday when the car in which they were traveling skidded off a road and hit a utility pole on a dark and wooded stretch in Anne Arundel County. And now, many young drivers are home for Thanksgiving, with four days without classes, homework or 10 o'clock curfews.

David and Betsy Devlin-Foltz sat down recently with their teenage son Sebi to remind him about seat belts. It was an obvious point, but one the parents thought was worth making after they read about the recent deaths of young motorists who weren't wearing theirs.

Sebi, a senior at Einstein High in Kensington, responded "with an assenting monosyllabic grunt, which we took as promising," his father said.

All of the crashes involved some combination of risk factors -- unlicensed or inexperienced drivers, challenging road conditions, unsafe speeds or failure to wear safety belts -- that typify traffic fatalities involving the young.

Seat belts are a particular concern to parents and officials. At least seven of the 10 dead teens were not wearing them.

Data from the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, soon to be published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that fewer than half of District teens reported always wearing seat belts when riding in cars driven by someone else. And 11.5 percent of students said they rarely or never wore seat belts, a slight increase from the last survey, in 2005. No comparable data were available for Maryland or Virginia.

"It's about one in nine kids," said Marc Clark, a D.C. schools official who oversees the survey locally. "And if you think of how often they hear that message . . ."

Seat belts may have been a factor in Tuesday's wreck, which injured the 19-year-old driver, Charles DeLaCruz, of Laurel, and at least one of his two 16-year-old passengers. Their car left the roadway, plunged into the woods and overturned on a stretch of Brock Bridge Road in Maryland City, at the edge of Patuxent Research Refuge. A fire spokesman told the Capital newspaper in Annapolis that some occupants were thrown from the vehicle.

The injured teens were flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore as a precaution, said a police spokesman. One teen, Luly Ramirez of Laurel, remains hospitalized. The other passengers were identified as Crevdonte Coppola of Beltsville and Shelby Donaldson of Montpelier.

The cause of the crash was under investigation, police said.

The teens, friends who met at Laurel High School, "were going to the movies or something," said Charles's older brother Luis DeLaCruz. "My brother told me a deer ran out and he tried not to hit it."

Too many teen motorists regard seat belts as an option, along with speed limits, curfews and even driver licenses, according to teen drivers, educators and parents.

Amanda Shea, 19, wears a seat belt religiously only because of the accident she had at 16, just after acquiring her license.

"There were two friends in my car with me, and we were all wearing seat belts, and that is why we were all okay," said Shea, of Mechanicsville, who studies at the College of Southern Maryland.

She cites attitudes toward safety belts as one of several risk behaviors she sees in herself and other young drivers she knows, including a propensity to dance along to CDs and to text-message on cellphones while at the steering wheel of a moving vehicle.

"I'm not kidding," she said. "I ran into my garage door three or four times because I was text-messaging. I had to pay for them all, too, and it was expensive."

The recent fatalities have prompted a call for stronger enforcement and awareness of teenage driving laws by state Del. William A. Bronrott, a Montgomery Democrat.

Three years ago, when 15 youths died in a span of a month in the Washington area, Bronrott and other Maryland lawmakers passed a set of restrictions on teenage driving.

"We now have a good set of safety laws in place, but we have to get teens and their parents educated on what the rules are," Bronrott said.

One new restriction passed in 2005, for example, forbids teenage drivers from carrying other teens while unsupervised during the first five months after getting a license. According to that rule, the teenage driver in a Charles County accident earlier this month should not have been carrying other youths when the car crashed, killing four La Plata High School students and injuring one. None was wearing a seat belt.

Bronrott proposes a series of statewide campaigns that combine intense enforcement of teenage driving laws with a media blitz. Such campaigns already exist to reduce drunk driving accidents. Bronrott also said he is considering introducing legislation that would impose a stricter curfew on teenage driving at night, when there is a higher chance of accidents. Several of the recent crashes occurred just before and after school hours.

The existing law, part of the 2005 package on teenage driving restrictions, bars teens from driving between midnight and 5 a.m. during the first two years of driving. But after discussions with officials from the National Transportation Safety Board and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Bronrott said he thinks an earlier curfew for teens -- as early as 9 p.m. -- could save lives.

"But it's like raising the driving age to 18," he said. "I don't know if the political will for that would be there."

Staff writer William Wan and news researcher Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.