Marietta High School junior Liv Teverino was on a routine trip after cross-country practice on Sept. 18, 2023, when her Volvo SUV left the road, crashed and caught fire. The 16-year-old’s death was a gut punch to the Blue Devil community.
Alpharetta High School lost senior Aryan Joshi in a May 14 crash that also killed two 18-year-old UGA students, Anvi Sharma and Sriya Avasarala. The wreck injured two other 18 year olds. Police said speed was a factor.
The Lutzie 43 Foundation, run by Mike Lutzenkirchen and his family, and Georgia Department of Transportation finished their 17th and 18th teen safe driving summits together this week. They deployed to Marietta High and Alpharetta High for good reason.
Lutzenkirchen has been advocating for safe driving all over the country since his son, Philip Lutzenkirchen, a standout tight end for Auburn University’ football team and graduate of Marietta’s Lassiter High School, died in a drunken driving crash in 2014.
Philip and his friends were intoxicated. Only one of the passengers was wearing a seatbelt. And that person was the only one who survived.
The elder Lutzenkirchen centered his keynote talk on his son, who was 23 when he died. A video montage played at the Sept. 30 summit portrayed Philip as a radiant and loving leader. But Lutzenkirchen points out that his son was not a leader on the night of his death. If Philip or any one of the other passengers had paused to reconsider whether they were fit to drive, the crash never would have happened.
Lutzie 43 urges teens to take “43 Key Seconds” — the same as the number on Philip Lutzenkirchen’s Auburn jersey — to pause before driving. Drivers should take the time to make sure they have a clear head (are sober), clear hands and eyes (no texting or other distractions), and to click it (wearing a seat belt).
Surprisingly, seat belt use still isn’t universal.
“The latest stats are [in] 61% of our fatalities on our roadways in the U.S., the person [killed] wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” Lutzenkirchen told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the Marietta High summit.
At the summits, Lutzie 43 offers 30-minute sessions led by experts in various fields. Wellstar Health System employees show students mock emergency and physical rehab rooms, with actors playing teens injured in wrecks.
For the Marietta event, Marietta City and Cobb County police departments joined Georgia State Patrol and Georgia Motor Carriers Compliance Division to explain what their respective agencies do and what they have observed with teen drivers and crash scenes.
The American Trucking Association and FedEx each sent reps to talk about driving safely around tractor trailers and the surprising amount of blind spots and stopping distance those giant trucks need.
Trucking stakeholders brought a big rig to the Marietta High parking lot and staged law enforcement vehicles and a GDOT HERO unit in the blind spots to really sell that point.
Lutzenkirchen said the biggest obstacle he sees is the lack of prioritization that schools place on driving education. “More and more schools are not offering drivers ed as a classroom activity. It’s [offered as] a volunteer, after school, or weekend, or during a break.”
He also said that trying to get Lutzie 43′s and GDOT’s summits inside major school districts has been tough. One reason could be because the summits require taking kids out of class for at least half the normal school day.
But most people would argue that the half day is worth saving lives. Lutzenkirchen thinks his foundation’s efforts have played at least a small part in Georgia’s decrease in annual road fatalities.
Lutzie 43 and GDOT have done 18 summits and reached approximately 10,000 kids, a big milestone. Hundreds of thousands of teens live in Georgia. Driving is one of the leading killers of high schoolers.
Hopefully enough large school districts will take note of this and will be more proactive on drivers education before tragedy brings them to their knees.
Doug Turnbull has covered Atlanta traffic for over 20 years. You can contact him at fireballturnbull@gmail.com.
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