28 February 2014

Meet Stacey, 17. She’s the focus of the latest Eastern Bay Road Safety Programme campaign aimed at young drivers, particularly those in rural areas. With her help we hope to highlight the dangers of taking risks on the road and encourage young people to make better driving decisions. We aim to use engaging stories about real people to highlight the fact dangerous driving destroys lives. That’s where Stacey comes in. 

Stacey’s a born-and-bred Eastern Bay girl. She had a typical Kiwi childhood spent swimming, digging for pipis and building sandcastles at Ōhope, scraping her knees and elbows playing in local parks and roaming barefoot around Coastlands, in and out of friends’ houses.

These past few years she’s graduated to shopping, dancing, gossiping and so on with those same friends.  But she still loves hanging out on the beach. Stacey’s also a keen netballer, loves running and can’t wait to finish school and start studying law at Waikato University.

She works part-time at a local bakery to save money for uni, but has been known to skip a shift if the sun’s out and the beach beckons. She’s also a big practical joker. Her friends never quite know what she’ll do next; they say being around her is far from boring.

One Friday evening in October, 2011, Stacey and a group of those friends got together for pizza and DVDs. It was just another night. Exams were looming, and they needed a break from studying, especially Stacey. She’d worked hard all year to get the grades needed for law school and she’d had enough.

“Tonight,” she told her friends, “we’re not allowed to talk about school.”

There’d been a hint of summer warmth in the air all day and they sat outside eating double cheese corn chips – Stacey’s favourite – as the evening set in. Then they put on the first movie.

It was terrible. They were talking so much it took them a while to realise that, but eventually they flipped a coin to decide who’d drive down the road to get a new one. Stacey lost. So she headed out in her mother’s battered blue Honda, borrowed for the night on the condition Stacey, who’d just got her restricted licence, wouldn’t take passengers or drive after 10pm.

She carefully pulled on to the road and headed for the video store.

It was just after 7pm.

What do you think happens next? Follow Stacey’s story.