On May 18, 2008, Jacy Good graduated from Muhlenberg College In Pennsylvania. She got into the car with her parents for a 90 minute drive home. They never made it.
A teenager driving and talking on a cell phone drove through a red light, causing a loaded box truck to swerve to miss the teen’s car. Instead, the truck crashed head on into Jacy Good’s parents van killing her mother and father. Given only a 10 percent chance at surviving, Jacy does not remember the next two months of her life. She sustained a traumatic brain injury which meant her dream of working for Habitat for Humanity the rest of her life would never happen.
After months of rehab, Jacy learned to read, speak, walk, dress and feed herself. She worked to regain her skills by starting with kindergarten-level homework and working up from there.
She married her boyfriend, Steve Johnson, in October 2013. They had met three years before the crash and he was by her side the entire time.
The couple now travels across the country discussing the dangers of distracting driving including texting and talking on cell phones.
“I live in a new normal now,” Jacy wrote on her website. “I’m one of the estimated half a million injuries each year in this country caused by phone use behind the wheel. My parents were two of the 5,870 American distracted driving fatalities in 2008. Maybe it’s time for a change, because while my wreck might be just another set of numbers in some ledger, I sure don’t feel like a statistic. I feel like a person whose life was permanently damaged by someone else’s bad and preventable decision. I wonder how other statistics feel? Hang up and drive.”
Jacy and Steve are in North Carolina through early next week speaking to students at 11 high schools across the state.
They will bring their StreetSage Lifesaving Driving Experience story to Corinth Holders High School on Friday at 9:00am and West Johnston High School at 1:00pm.
The appearance was made possible in part with help from the Johnston County District Attorney’s Office, school board member Ronald Johnson, the Law Office of Antoan Whidbee, JoCo Teen Drivers, and the Johnston County Fireman’s Association.