Drunken driving play sends strong message

LINCOLN – Dailyn Markie never had a chance.

The drunken driver whose car T-boned her vehicle hit with such force that she got thrown clear of her own car, coming to rest upon her assailant’s hood with a deep gash on her left leg and a heavy laceration and possible skull fracture under her bloody hairline.

The firefighters and paramedics who rushed to her side could do little as life slowly ebbed from the 18-year-old Chester student. She died. Her mother, Sarah Olsen, tearfully identified the body, and she was honored in a memorial service at Mattanawcook Academy.

That, at least, was the scenario played out Friday on academy grounds, and if this fake drunken driving tragedy sounds real, that’s only because the Lincoln and Penobscot County police, sheriff’s deputies and rescue workers who helped set the scene infused it with all the details they see when it is real.

That’s probably why Markie and many other academy students cried real tears.

“I was fine until they put the blanket over me and my mother had to identify the body,” Markie said Friday, her hairline still tinged with red paint. “I couldn’t handle it after that. Neither could my mother.”

Markie was among 28 students in the “Wake-Up Call” program who acted the range of parts played when such tragedies unfold. The point of the three-part, student-designed drama was to show academy students what happens when people drink and drive.

“It’s designed for the students to be more aware of the choices they make in life,” Lincoln firefighter Rick Smart said Friday. “We make it as realistic as we can. We even have someone who does makeup on the victims so that they look like they are bleeding.

“It affects quite a few of them,” Smart said of the students. “The stories we tell are all of real accidents we have been to or that our family or friends have been involved with.”

The enactors brought two banged up old cars to play the wrecks and stationed the victims around and atop them accordingly for Segment One – the re-enactment of the crash and the arrest of the drunken driver. Segment Two featured emergency nurses discussing what the injuries do to those who suffer them. Segment Three was a mock funeral in the school gym.

About 500 people, including the entire student body and many parents, attended all segments, Principal Jim Boothby said. The sister of an academy student killed in an accident in 1987 also spoke to the students of her harrowing experiences.

Boothby hoped the fake drama, the first put on at the academy in five or six years, would prevent a real-life re-enactment.

“Ultimately, the kids will make their own decisions,” Boothby said. “All I want them to do is process the information we have given them.”

Markie believed the presentation would help.

“A lot of people thought it would be a joke until they sat through the presentations,” she said. “I don’t think they realized how this could affect them until they put themselves in someone else’s shoes.”

Markie hoped one presentation effect would fade away fast – the red paint in her hair.

“I hope it comes out,” Markie said. “Goodness.”