[matt murphy]

Jeff,

Mid 20's is Young. That is the group that is just getting their first cars. Some get them at 16 or 18, but others have to wait and save. The local street racer scene here is 20 year olds. I'll admit I have done some stupid things in cars, but thankfully, I was lucky enough to not get killed. I too blame the movies and TV for a lot of this stuff these kids see and want to try to do to impress the girls or their friends. I guess fortunately for me my Mom was a nurse and saw too many tragedies at the hospital and didn't want her sons or daughters to end up like the kids she worked with. I wasn't able to get a car until I was out of school. All my friends had cars except me, but my parents believed at a young age you don't need a car. I guess I was lucky because when I was 18, I got hit by a drunk driver on a Saturday afternoon, in my friends subdivision with 6 of my friends in my dads car. We all walked away from that accident, and the drunk ran away and left his mothers car there at the scene, totalled. He convienently reported it stolen later, but left his ID in the car and we also identified him. It is unfortunite that most of us need to experience the death or tragedy to stop doing something as dumb as street racing, or just messing around in cars.

Last May at the Atlanta F-body show, about 100 kids, most of them in their 20's and 30's saw a street race go horrible bad, when 4 kids were in a new Camaro and two others were in a Trans Am. The story was that the Camaro hit his Nitrous and right in front of the host hotel at about 1:30am and with about 80 onlookers watching the race, the Camaro lost control and crashed into the embankment and hit a telephone pole and crashed so violently that the car was ripped in half and the two in the back were thrown and partly decapitated and killed instantly in front of the crowd of cheerers and people egging other drivers to race in the street all night. The driver was thought to be dead and the only one wearing a seat belt was a girl in the front passenger seat, who didn't know any of the other kids in the car, she was just along for the ride to the Waffle House restaurant, when the two drivers decided to line up and race. Their intentions were to go eat and two died and a third who barely survived and a fourth that will forever be traumatized by the accident.

All very sad . . .