"Michael Pardee" ...
> Three years ago one of my wife's friends neglected to belt up before she
> got on the icy highway. The car slid off and she broke the passenger's
> door with her butt, fracturing a vertebrum. She was taken off in an
> ambulance and has only partially recovered so far - if she had been belted
> in she could have driven her car home.
>
> Two years ago a friend was driving his work truck westbound from Phoenix
> on I-10. A car in the next lane and slightly ahead had a blowout at 75 mph
> and the driver overcorrected, veering sideways in front of my friend's
> truck. With no time to react my friend's truck hit the car in the driver's
> door, sending it rolling madly down the freeway until it came to rest on
> its roof. All the glass was gone and the car was unrecognizable. The young
> woman driving it unfastened her belt and crawled out with just a cut on
> her hand. When she recovered some of her wits she started screaming, "My
> baby!" My friend and one of the others who had stopped crawled inside to
> find an infant in a baby seat in the center of the rear seat, looking
> puzzled. They unfastened the baby seat from the car and lifted it out.
> Mother and baby slept in their own beds that night instead of any of the
> awful alternatives.
>
> Last year my wife's sister didn't notice the car in front of her had
> stopped. She hit the stopped car; she was unbelted and the steering wheel
> tore her liver completely in two. Her young daughter had belted herself in
> the passenger seat and was unhurt.
>
> Somehow it really doesn't seem very hard to understand.
>
> Mike
>
>
You would think so, but apparently it isn't.

I became even more of restraint fanatic after working in an Emergency Room.

I remember a New Year's Eve fatality with a 17-year-old girl, who, when you
looked at her body, there was barely a mark on her, but she died instantly
when her unrestrained head hit just the right part of the inside of the car.
(she wasn't drunk or high, either)

What a waste.

Natalie