DUNCAN, Okla_More than 100,000 times a year, a car crashes and someone is injured or dies because they're texting. So, we're partnering with AT&T to jumpstart their nationwide campaign to convince drivers that texting can wait. You might think that teenagers are the only ones who text and drive but sometimes parents are behind the wheel with a cell phone in their hand.
She says she is lucky to be alive. Shonna Calaway is old enough to know better. Texting and driving kills people and leaves children without a parent. Shonna was texting her 11 year old daughter Karson when she went off the road. When Karson found out mom had a wreck while texting her, she was devastated. Imagine how she would have felt for the rest of her life, if she had waited for a text that never came.
"I had driven that road a 100 times, I knew it like the back of my hand."
It was dark, nobody else on the road. What could it hurt?
"The perspective as you're texting and driving is so different but you don't realize it until you come up on something. So this stop sign that I though was a thousand feet away all of a sudden was you know ten yards away."
She lost control, plunged into a ditch, nearly totaled her car, hurt and alone by the side of the road for an hour before she was found, but she was alive. But what If a vehicle had been in that intersection?
"I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be here at all and I don't know that they would be here either and then you think of the repercussions of that and the lifelong guilt if you had injured, if I had injured because of my irresponsibility."
When I asked her why she would share her story on television and open herself up to potential criticism, Shonna, a middle school teacher, said she wanted people to learn from her experience.
"Awareness now of how dangerous texting and driving is even to this day I have some very dear friends and if they know I'm going on a trip or even to the city or to run to Lawton they will always say don't you dare pick up that phone."
It seems so simple, driving down the road with or without traffic around you, just one text won't hurt. Shonna thought that way but now she knows better. You can't teach what you don't know. This teacher has learned the hard way, and it's a lesson she wants to share with you. Fortunately for her, she lived to tell the story.
"That wrecked changed my life, because I believe at that point I realized I'm not invincible you know I can hurt somebody, I could hurt myself."
We've all seen people texting and driving, you can't count all the people that have told us their story, being rear ended by a driver admitting to police that they were texting and driving. More laws prohibiting texting and driving are on the way, but a strong dose of reality and common sense may help even more.
