CANEY CREEK STUDENTS PARTICIPATE IN SHATTERED LIVES-photos and video

April 17 2013, 9:10 pm

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Tuesday morning ambulances, fire trucks and multiple police units were seen entering the Caney Creek High School campus just after 9 a.m.. On the back parking lot with five vehicles both overturned and wrecked were almost twenty students both dead and alive.

All were part of this years Shattered Lives program aimed at teaching the students to make rational decisions. It focuses not on just drunk driving but texting while driving or any other type of distraction while driving.

As fire crews from the Caney Creek Fire Department worked to free trapped patients and DPS and Precinct 4 Deputy Constables dealt with the male and female intoxicated drivers, Juniors and Seniors and their parents looked on.

The injured were transported to the hospital by MCHD. The dead to the funeral home by both Cashner and Metcalf Funeral Directors.

The parents of the dead students shook as the obituaries were read of their children. Many students in class rooms were shaken as the Grim Reaper entered another classroom every 30 minutes throughout the day along with a law enforcement officer removed a student from that classroom as the obituary of that student was read.

The program is put on by Shattered Lives of Montgomery County. Mike Valdez is the director of the program which has run over 10 years already. Every high school in Montgomery is shown the program once every two years.

There are thousands of hours donated by volunteers of the organization along with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Alumni Group The cost of the program is over $10,000 per school which comes mostly from donations.

This year was especially hard for some students, fire and EMS workers and law enforcement officers. Just a little over a year ago Halie McDonald, a Caney Creek Student was killed on a curve on a curve on FM 1485 just north of the school. The driver of the vehicle, Caney Creek baseball star Daniel Freund was intoxicated and is now awaiting trial for intoxication manslaughter.

Trooper Robert Oelsner worked the crash that night. He remembers pulling up to the scene and seeing what was left of a 2002 Saturn after striking and breaking off 2 utility poles. Halie was dead. Oelsner said he still drives by the memorial site on FM 1485 every day he is on patrol and says hello to Hallie. He takes extra time when he stops students for various traffic violations or on crashes to tell them about Halie, the hurt the parents are going through, the pain he still has, and how a bad decision changed hundreds of lives.

Caney Creek has a more than normal loss of the student population. Most of the losses are due to auto accidents.