By DEVIN WEEKS

Staff Writer

RATHDRUM — The crunch of metal.

The wail of sirens.

The hysterical screams.

The zip of a body bag.

Lakeland High School seniors experienced it all Friday morning. Although the mock DUI fatality crash presented to them was just a performance — a very realistic performance — it was designed to linger in their minds as they celebrate their high school graduation.

"It was extremely intense," senior Jon Burger said. "I don’t think words can necessarily describe what I walked in thinking it was going to be to what it actually was. It’s staged, but it’s still an emotional situation."

The scene on Main Street near Lakeland Junior High School mirrored carnage that no one wants to discover: Two cars were smashed from a collision. Beer cans were scattered about, blood (or, in this case, dyed corn syrup) had left a violent stain on the pavement. Injured students — each of them younger than the legal drinking age — were crying out in pain, trapped in ruined cars.

One of their classmates was dead.

And the life of the young man whose actions killed her would never be the same again.

Students watched the grim tableau from bleachers on the field as Northern Lakes Fire District personnel and Idaho State Police troopers rolled up to the scene. First responders used the Jaws of Life to extract the students. Car tops were sawed off. The blades of a LifeFlight helicopter reverberated in the distance.

It took a moment to remember it wasn’t real.

“Before they pulled the tarp down, even when I heard them screaming and I knew who it was, right there it felt real," senior Taylor Blanchette said. "Seeing people I know and that I’ve grown up with looking like that, even Katelynn on the hood of the car, completely still, it just felt so crazy."

Katelynn Kline, also a senior, volunteered to be the casualty. Her family, like many, has been rocked by one of these preventable tragedies.

"I’ve seen what drinking and driving does to people,” she said. "A really close family friend died in a drinking and driving accident, and I’ve seen what it does to families and I just want to let my fellow classmates know what it does and how it makes your parents feel."

Trysta Kelley of Athol graduated from Lakeland in 2014. As a senior, she volunteered to be the makeup person for the mock crash and has done it every year since.

“I don’t think there’s one I haven’t cried at,” she said. “I had a cousin who got in a very bad car wreck from a drunk driver. It ended up he spent months in the hospital recuperating, metal rods through his whole body. He has made a full recovery now, but it did take him a long time. The drunk driver was completely fine, of course, and then hid in the bushes while my cousin was [nearly fatally injured]. So it hits home for me."

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 712 people were killed in crashes involving a drunk driver in Idaho between 2003 to 2012. In 2016, 10,497 people across the country died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28 percent of all traffic-related deaths in the United States. Also in 2016, more than 1 million drivers were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics.

DUIs exact more than a human toll. Many people who are arrested on drunk-driving charges face jail time, heavy fines, potential loss of driving privileges and signficantly higher insurance premiums.

Event organizers hope students realize that those costs are secondary. The point, they emphasized, was that no amount of money can ever bring a victim back from a fatality.

"We ultimately want these kids to learn that if they decide to drink once they’re older or even just in high school that they do it safely and appropriately," ISP Trooper Enrique Llerenas said. "Of course, we don’t condone them drinking, but we want to deter any kind of what we’re going to see today happening in the future. We’re working really hard as state police and all kinds of law enforcement in the area to deter that and stop DUIs and crashes and these kinds of deaths."