Eight Friends Hope To Turn Near-Death Experience Into Lesson For Teens
AUBURN (CBS) - Eight best friends from Central Massachusetts survived a terrible accident in Auburn on Sunday and are now trying to turn their bad experience into a lesson for other teenagers.
The girls all piled into one SUV on Sunday evening, after their softball team's banquet. Three of the young women even crammed themselves into the vehicle's hatchback. No one was wearing a seat belt.
"We all knew what to do," says 17-year-old Pauline Muise. "But we didn't do it."
They were laughing, singing, and barely going over the speed limit when everything went wrong.
"The car just like went out of control," explains the driver, 17-year-old Holly Gignilliat. "It ended up on the other side of the road. And as soon as I tried to pull the car back onto the road on our side, the car just did a 180 and we ended up facing the other direction."
The SUV came to rest on its roof and the eight young women inside were tossed around like dice. Incredibly, they all survived and only two had minor injuries. One of them, 15-year-old Kelly Moriarty, broke two of her vertebrae.
"As soon as we got out I looked around and I saw everybody was standing," Moriarty says. "And I was like, how are we all standing after we flipped over? I don't think it's still set into us that we all lived through this."
But the young women tell WBZ they now want to use their experience to remind other teens that no one is as invincible as they feel in their youth.
"Teenagers are going to look at this and think, 'Oh, they're over-exaggerating. We're still going to do what we want,'" says Muise. "But if we can get one group of teenagers to change their minds, maybe we can save somebody from going through what we went through."
"We don't want to keep it hidden," offered 16-year-old Shayna Kubilis. "I mean, yeah, we are kind of ashamed that we did it, and it's stupid. But we want other people to not be stupid like we were at the time."
They've already started talking about the lessons they've learned back at school this week. And they are considering following the advice of one guidance counselor who suggested they make presentations about driving safety this spring, around prom season.
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