Posted on March 27, 2008
“I promise not to waste your time. I promise not to preach to you.”
His words were simple, but Mark Sterner’s message to the people attending the One Night, One Ride, One Life event at Grafton-Stovall Theatre Monday night was one of utmost importance – you must deal with the consequences of your actions.
In the spring of 1994, Sterner and four of his fraternity brothers took a trip to Florida for Spring Break. It was their senior year in college, and they had never been anywhere on vacation for Spring Break.
Each night they took turns being the designated driver, but since they were staying for six nights and there were five of them, they decided that the least intoxicated among them at the end of the night would drive home. One evening that person was Sterner, who lost control of their rented Lincoln Towncar and flipped it across the road at between 50 and 60 mph. Three of his friends, two age 21 and one age 22, were killed.
Sterner stressed to the audience repeatedly that he did not want to influence them in any way. He began the presentation with a few questions for the room.
“How many of you have ever done something stupid while drunk?” Sterner said. “How many of you have not remembered things you did the night before due to alcohol? How many of you have ever ridden in a car with a drunk driver?”
A few scattered hands tentatively rose throughout the crowd, but Sterner’s was the only hand raised after the last question: “How many of you have ever killed three of your best friends while driving drunk?”
After a few more opening remarks, Sterner showed a videotape of he and his friends’ last night on Spring Break. Images of typical college students pre-gaming with shots of Jägermeister and excitedly getting ready to “rage” made some people in the room laugh, but silence filled the auditorium as the video of the fun-filled night transitioned into ghastly images of twisted metal and broken glass.
Sterner, having come back out in front of the crowd in his orange prison jumpsuit, spoke briefly about his time in prison.
“Instead of being the first person in my family to graduate college, I became the first to go to prison,” Sterner said about the pain and anguish inflicted on his own family as well as the family of his deceased friends.
Students seemed to take Sterner’s message seriously.
“Mark wasn’t attempting to preach or condescend,” freshman Marissa Robinson said.
“His presentation was very informative and I think it made people realize that drunk-driving accidents can happen to anyone at any time, including JMU students.”
Some feel JMU offers enough transportation to limit drunk driving.
“I don’t think DUI’s are such a big problem, especially among JMU students, just because there are so many other options like buses, cabs and SafeRides,” freshman Josh Mlynar said.
The general consensus seemed to be that DUI wasn’t as big a problem here as at other schools.
“As an upperclassman with a car at school, I definitely think DUI’s can be a problem,” junior Sean Combs said. “But because of the nature of the bus systems and the fact that Port Republic Road has a lot of student housing in a small area, I feel like it’s not such a huge problem.”
In Sterner’s final words of his presentation were to reiterate the overall simple theme of his entire speech.
“Life is all about choices. Which one will you make?”
