Students get a powerful lesson about DUI

The issue of drinking and driving is hardly a new one, but despite constant warnings, alcohol related tragedies continue to occur on college campuses throughout the nation.

Monday night in the Center for the Arts, an influential presentation hit home for many UB students, athletes, resident advisors and those involved in Greek life, as they heard once more about the possible consequences of a drunken night behind the steering wheel.

Mark Sterner has traveled the country, stopped at hundreds of schools, and reached out to over one million people with his presentation "DUI: A Powerful Lesson." It is the true story of Sterner and his four best friends, and their spring break gone wrong.

"How many of you have done something stupid when you were drunk?" said Sterner. "How many of you have woken up and not known where you were?"

The audience laughed, perhaps recalling recent nights spent partying and having fun with their friends. That is until Sterner hit them with the last question.

"How many of you have driven drunk and killed three of your best friends?" he said.

The audience was silenced.

What started out as a typical college spring break, a week in Florida filled with beer, beaches and girls, turned into a nightmare that haunts Sterner to this day.

"It was our senior year in college and we wanted to experience a spring break like you see in MTV and the movies," he said.

Sterner began his presentation with a video he had taken on their last night of vacation. It was a video he said he had made to look back on in twenty years and laugh at.

The movie showed the five college students drinking in their hotel before they left for the bar. They consumed a bottle of J?_germeister and Rumpleminze before heading out.

The movie was comical. The boys were full of energy, joking and having fun as they drove to the bar, where the video showed them dancing wildly and singing. The last of the videotape was taken only minutes before three of them would die.

Sterner said that their plan that night had been to have the least drunk of the five guys drive home. He was elected driver, got behind the wheel, and at some point during the fifteen-minute drive home swerved off the road and hit a tree.

"Our plan each night was for someone to take a turn as a designated driver, and it worked every time," he said. "Except for the last time."

Sterner gained consciousness two weeks later. He and his friend Darren had both survived the crash. His best friends Aaron, Pete and Jim, all aged either 22 or 23, were killed.

Sterner had been thrown 40 yards from his car, survived a broken rib, punctured lung, broken pelvis and tree branches through his arm and foot. His blood alcohol content was .17, twice Florida's legal limit.

According to Sterner, if he and his friends had been wearing their seatbelts they most likely would have all survived.

"As I lay in the hospital bed all I wanted to do was die," he said. "The only thing I was thinking about was my friends. This stuff didn't happen to me, it happened to other people."

Surrounded by his family, Sterner found himself without his three best friends, and charged with three counts of DWI manslaughter.

The college senior, with a 3.6 grade point average and three months until graduation, now found himself facing a maximum prison sentence of 45 years.

"I could never have guessed how dramatically my life would change," said Sterner. "I was going to be the first person in my family to graduate from college, now I was going to be the first person to go to jail."

Due to the sympathy of his friend's parents, Sterner was sentenced to three years in a maximum-security prison in Florida and 10 years on probation. Currently released from jail, he tells his story to prevent other people from making the same mistake.

Sterner did not preach, but instead spoke about his life now in a sober and serious manner. Although his prison term is over, and his probation will soon be over, he said the pain he lives with every day will never go away.

"You may have heard that time heals all wounds," he said. "But if you've ever lost someone close to you, you know that's not true. Not a day goes by when I don't think about my friends and where they'd be today. Because of one night, because I was stupid, they're dead. And there's no punishment worse than that."

Sterner encouraged the audience to think twice about their actions. To really listen to what he was saying: to call a sober friend to drive them home, and to talk to friends with alcohol abuse problems.

"There'll be other parties, other times to celebrate," he said. "The last night of fun my friends had, do you think it was worth it?"

Sterner's emotional account of guilt and regret, left students with a lasting impression.

"Seeing that video made me see how real the situation was, and it really hit me," said Kristen Fellows, a junior psychology major. "It proved that those guys were just like anybody else. It was like you weren't watching them on screen, you were watching yourself."

Many students said the DWI presentation made it hard to brush off drunk driving accidents as impossible events.

"I thought it was really effective," said Courtney MacVie, a freshman undecided major and member of the soccer team. "You don't hear about it a lot, but it does happen."

Ray Arjomand, a junior English and history major, said he saw the potential that the presentation had to affect people's future choices.

"If it touches one person, that's what really matters," he said. "Young people can value life too little and may dismiss it at first, but I'd like to think it would help people."

Sterner ended his presentation by making the point that nobody is invincible.

"The worst thing about being lucky," he said, "is that you never know you're out of luck until your time runs out."