TUESDAY,APRIL23,2002
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN - 3A
Speaker shares drunken driving story
JOHN NOWAK/KANSAN
Mark Sterner tours college campuses nationwide to talk about drinking and driving. Sterner served two years in a Florida penitentiary for the deaths of three of his friends in a car accident while on spring break in 1994.
By Caroline Boyer
Kansan staff writer
Mark Sterner began his speech at the Lied Center last night with questions.
He asked how many people had done something crazy during spring break, how many had woken up in the morning and wondered where they were, and how many had nominated the least drunk person as the driver.
"How many people have been driving drunk and killed three of their friends?" Sterner asked in his last question, raising his own hand.
In a speech sponsored by the Interfraternity Council, Panhellenic Association, Student Senate and Coca-Cola, Sterner shared his experience of driving drunk with an audience of about 1.500 people.
"I didn't come here tonight to preach to you. I didn't come to tell you what to do. I just came to tell you about what happened to me and my friends." Sterner said.
The Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Association chose Sterner to be a speaker for their spring lecture series. Erin McCall, vice president of educational programs and scholarships for Panhellenic, said IFC and PHA found Sterner through an organization called CampusSpeak.
"We thought that drinking and driving was a big issue and something that hadn't really been addressed at KU." McCall, Tulsa, Okla, junior, said.
McCall said she thought Sterner would have a big impact on the audience because he was closer to the age of most college students.
"We won't view him as a parent scolding us and telling us what
not to do, and we'll be able to relate to him." McCall said.
The audience did respond to Sterner's questions; when he asked how many people had lost a friend or family member to drunk driving, almost half raised their hands.
Stemer described the night his friends died, and he almost died. He
was chosen to drive home because he was deemed the least drunk.
Sterner said although his blood alcohol level was 17, twice the legal limit in Florida, later tests showed that all of his friends had higher levels.
"So we were right, I was the least drunk person in the car,"
Sterner said.
He and his friends had been using a video camera to film their last night of spring break during the night, which Sterner showed during the speech, followed by pictures of the wrecked Lincoln Towncar he had driving.
Sterner got into the 1994 accident while driving about 55 to 60 miles per hour. All five people in the car were thrown from it. Two were thrown into trees and died on impact; one was crushed underneath the car. One of Sterner's friends survived the crash with only minor injuries, though Sterner himself lost a third of the blood in his body and barely survived.
Once he woke up in the hospital, he was charged with the deaths of his three friends and could have been sentenced to 45 years in jail. He served two years and is now on a 12 year probation that will end in November of 2008.
Sterner said he made the decision to speak about his experience because he needed something good to come out of what happened.
"Prison's over, probation will be over, but what will never be over, in my head and in my heart, are the thoughts of my friends and what they could be doing right now." Sterner said.
Audience members were affected emotionally, and IFC and PHA provided counselors for anyone who needed to talk after the speech.
"I don't think there was a dry eye in there," Megan Rose, Chicago freshman, said. "It affected a lot of the students."
Contact Bover at
cboyer@kansan.com. This story was edited by Anne Mergenmeier.
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