ISSUE: Young people and fatal crashes

OUR VIEW: The stories are news and need telling as lessons for remembrance.

Last Saturday’s newspaper brought yet another story of a fatal accident involving a young person.

Presbyterian College player and former Edisto High School football star Larry Thomas II. died in a single-car accident that previous morning in Newberry County. The 20-year-old is one of 238 people to die on the state’s roads already this year. He became Newberry County’s third traffic fatality.

Orangeburg County already has 11, two more than at this time a year ago.

The numbers show young people are at great risk, dying in numbers and percentages higher than other motorists. But as in the case of student-athlete Thomas, such a death is about so much more than numbers, risks and newspaper stories.

In one instance from 2005, however, a mother notes that not all deaths make the headlines. Whether as a lesson to others about what can happen, a memorial to the deceased or simply to let others know of a death and what happened, such an account is important.

It is even to this day to Dawn Peer of Orangeburg. Her 19-year-old son Dustin died on Sept. 27, 2005, on Highway 78 traveling toward Branchville. He was driving his first car that night. It was late. He was alone. The theory is he grew very tired. A single-car crash took his life.

His death did not become the subject of newspaper coverage beyond the young man’s obituary, prompting Dawn to inquire after seeing a 2007 story about yet another teen-ager being killed: Why no such article in The T&D about Dustin?

Our answer: There should have been.

It is worthy of note what happened to Dustin in death and what happened to him in life. He lived in Orangeburg County for 13 years of his life. He was an honor roll student in Branchville. He won second place in the school’s billboard contest for the non-smoking campaign and his drawing was posted all over the county.

Dawn Peer wrote also: “I see articles all the time in The T&D about teenagers’ accidents, deaths and disappearances.

And there too is the point to be reiterated: Life and death are news of the highest order. A natural death of a person nearing the end of life’s cycle is news, but generally not of the order of a young person in life’s early years dying in such a tragic fashion.

If the deaths of Dustin, and Larry, and the many others serve as a reminder to young people of what can and does happen on the roads and highways, the stories about them and their lives need telling –- and remembering.

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