Grace Wight stood on the side of a dark rural road, her voice cracking as she called 911. Wight, just 17 at the time, had hit someone with her truck. She needed help.
“Is she breathing?” the dispatcher asked.
A long silence.
“Ma’am, is she breathing?”
More silence.
“Ma’am?”
“I think she’s dead.”
More than a hundred students at John Stark Regional High School held their breath as Wight listened to her 911 call for the first time since her trial.
She relived the moment when she told the operator how she had fallen asleep at the wheel on her way back from a friend’s house, and how she awoke to find that she had crossed the centerline on Center Road in Lyndeborough at 2 a.m. and hit a woman walking on the other side of the road.
Wight played the emergency call Thursday morning as part of a talk she gave to John Stark juniors and seniors for Safe Driving Week. She told her story to warn them of the dangers of distracted driving.
“I never would have thought in a million years that this would happen to me,” she said. “But I want everyone to know that anything can happen to anyone at any time.”
Wight, now 19, was about to be senior at Wilton-Lyndeborough High School when she struck and killed 60-year-old Debess Rogers with her truck in July 2016. She had been a good kid, she said – co-captain of the soccer team, horseback-rider, class president three years running. She recently finished her freshman year as an Equine Studies major at SUNY Morrisville, N.Y.
But she reminded the audience that the fact that she wasn’t a troublemaker didn’t make her immune to tragedy.
Wight was charged with negligent homicide for killing Rogers. She stood trial on two felony charges and one misdemeanor and wound up pleading guilty to the misdemeanor of vehicular assault.
Prosecutors accused Wight of texting and driving, but a cellphone expert disputed that evidence, saying she was not using her phone at the time of the accident. The trial eventually ended in a plea bargain.
Wight underscored this in her talk Thursday, telling the audience that alcohol and drugs aren’t the only things that can cause a distracted driving accident.
“Many people still think I was under the influence of alcohol or drugs or my phone, but I can tell you I wasn’t,” she said. “I know in my heart that it was a true accident and that I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
She was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence, loss of her driver’s license for seven years, and 200 hours of community service.
Fifty of her community service hours must be completed by speaking to teenagers about distracted driving. Thursday’s talk was her first, and she said she was nervous, but her message was received loud and clear by the students of John Stark.
“It was definitely really emotional,” student Piper Maclean said. “A lot of the speakers that come here I don’t feel an emotional connection with, but during this one I actually started tearing up.”
“Almost every single person has been drowsy at the wheel or fell asleep at the wheel,” said Avery Gorhan, one of the student leaders of Safe Driving Week. “Her story shows what doing that could cause in just a split second.”
Wight’s talk illustrated what has become a big problem in New Hampshire and across the U.S. Nationally, distracted driving claimed 3,450 lives in 2016. In 2015, more than 390,000 people were injured in accidents caused by distracted driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The Youth Operator Program at Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth helped Wight with her presentation. The program’s Chelsie Hubicsak-Muldowney pointed out that since New Hampshire passed its hands-free law in 2015, distracted driving has dropped from the No. 2 cause of fatal crashes to No. 6.
“This is a decrease, but it is still happening and causing fatal crashes here in New Hampshire,” Hubicsak-Muldowney said in an email. “We definitely still have our work cut out for us.”
As for Wight, she said she will always regret getting in her car on the night of the accident, but she hopes telling her story will help other teens make better driving choices.
“People are always going to be tired when they drive late at night or early in the morning, but I want them to think about it before getting in the car,” she said. “Nothing can make me feel better about the situation – it was a horrible, tragic event – but it helps me to know that my story impacts other people.”