High schoolers get a taste of tragedy

One minute, they were heading to another party. The next was chaos, blood and death.

That was the scene outside the Nespelem Community Center April 18 as unveiled in an elaborate enactment involving vehicles full of Lake Roosevelt High School students.

Most of the student body stood on the other side of the black plastic curtain and a taped off border.

Beyond it, many of their classmates lay in a bloody scene depicting the kind of instant carnage that can happen when fragile flesh is forced against tons of steel after a poor decision.

The students had just listened to the lead-up to the scene before the curtain came down: the voices of their friends in a recorded party atmosphere with all the vibrance and energy of high school kids up for some fun. The banter is realistic, the way kids talk, including some words adults don't approve of.

Some 21 students had planned the scenario to be realistic, then created the sound production now playing over a loudspeaker until, suddenly, the crash.

The curtain drops. A car and a pickup have collided. Someone is unconscious on the hood of the car, another on top of the pickup cab. More inside. Still more on the ground. One can't get out.

Another car arrives. Then you hear the tones come over a police scanner, and real police respond to the scene from far away. After a few minutes, their sirens can be heard approaching on the highway, but it takes several minutes before any help arrives, much longer for enough to arrive.

This is a mass casualty event. More ambulances arrive. EMTs have to triage - make decisions about who to take first.

A father pleads with them to help his child, not realizing or accepting that it's too late.

The student audience watches the real professionals at work. The process unfolds within the limitations of time and space, no matter how desperate a loved one is to get help.

A responder is using the "jaws of life" mechanical jaws to cut away the passenger door of the car. Addy sits bloodied inside and can't get out.

The father behind the car still pleads for someone to help his kid.

As the badly injured survivors are taken to hospital, police begin to question witnesses and victims. A girl screams accusations at Blake. They argue. He insists this isn't his fault. Before too long, police have Blake taking field sobriety tests. He fails. He's arrested, handcuffed, put in a patrol car.

Several bodies are covered in sheets, no longer a need for a hospital.

After the scene concludes, Gina Erickson, a senior administrative assistant with the Colville Tribal Police Department, tells the audience to go into the community center, where they'll sit in circles to share their thoughts and feelings with each other and with the actors and the professionals who responded.

Tribal Fire/EMS Chief Chance Cruger lost his best friend to drinking and driving when they were in their early 20s. He implored the kids to use "positive peer pressure."

"If you get a little buzz in the back of your mind that maybe you shouldn't [go along with plans], speak up," he said. "If you silence yourself right then, you may be a victim. ... Use your voice and speak up."

The actors all went back to school that afternoon, but those who died wore white shrouds and were not to speak to others or do anything other than to be present. Those with injuries kept that gruesome makeup on all day, a day they and their peers are not likely to forget anytime soon.