VIDEO: California students’ “every 15 minutes” video imagines aftermath of bad choice

STOCKTON, California — It’s a ritual that many California high school students know all too well: Every year, the California Highway Patrol works with communities across the state to show young people what can happen when they combine drugs or alcohol and driving.

The “Every 15 Minutes” program includes dramatic re-enactments of accident scenes, with faculty, students, first responders, parents and police coming together to show what happens when bad choices are made and to “open the emotional doors, and … experience first hand how their actions affect the lives of so many other people,” according to a CHP description of the program.

Student journalists typically cover those re-enactments with photo, video and stories. But recently at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School in Stockton, a video team led by student Jefferson Leiva created an unusual video to drive the point home.

From a party where friends share hard liquor and play beer pong, to a young man’s decision to get into a car with three of his friends, to a collision with another car that sends several students to the hospital, to an emotional interview with a father whose son has died, and eventually a judge’s decision to send the driver to jail for 30 years, the Stagg Online’s video offers a moving narrative of how lives can unravel after a single bad choice to drink and drive.

Leiva and editor-in-chief Phillicity Uriarte-Jones worked with student videographers, Stockton police, fire department personnel and the California Highway Patrol, shooting video at a local emergency room, riding in police cars and dealing with a downed server during an all-night session to create this video in time for a school assembly.

According to a CHP procedural manual, the program’s name “was derived from the fact that in the early 1990’s, every fifteen minutes someone in the United States died in an alcohol-related traffic collision.” However, stricter laws and programs such as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, Students Against Destructive Decisions and Friday Night Live have lessened the toll. The CHP estimates that the death rate is now one every thirty minutes, “a figure which continues to be unacceptable.”

Leiva of Stagg High School said that the message he wanted to convey was simple: “Don’t become a statistic. Be responsible. Save a life.”

Even though the “15 minutes” was a demonstration, “the tears and heart breaks were not something one could act, improvise, or recreate,” Leiva observed.

“Every 15 minutes a family is robbed of life. Futures never given the chance to blossom,” he added. “We have the power to prevent that from happening.”