The mother of a Williams Lake 20-year-old killed by an alleged drunk driver told Lake City Secondary students Tuesday they have a huge amount of power when it comes to stopping impaired driving.
On April 22, 2012 Andrea MacDonald’s daughter, Rayel, was killed in Williams Lake while walking across Carson Avenue with a group of friends after the Indoor Rodeo dance.
“You guys can move mountains,” MacDonald said. “If someone had stepped in that night, if someone had said you’ve had too much to drink and taken the keys away from a drunk driver, Rayel would still be with us today.”
MacDonald encouraged the students to become heroes by stopping people from drinking and driving.
“You will be saving someone and a family from heartache and making the move to a better world where people aren’t killed by drinking and driving.”
Rayel was in Williams Lake in the nursing program at TRU.
She played rugby and soccer, was involved with Big Brothers and Big Sisters and helped coach the girls rugby team, MacDonald said.
“Rayel’s life was a blessing and I encourage you to honour her memory by helping to prevent a similar incident in the future,” MacDonald said of her daughter’s death.
MADD’s Western Canadian representative Jamie Fisher has been travelling through the Western provinces to host school assemblies and show MADD’s 2013 school assembly video Smashed.
Smashed tells the story of three people who were killed or permanently injured because of impaired driving.
After the video, Fisher told the students when he was 22 years old his mother was killed by an impaired driver.
It was her birthday, he’d bought her a bouquet of flowers, she never arrived home to see them.
“It never gets any easier,” he said.
Every day in Canada, four people are killed by impaired drivers and 175 are injured, Fisher said.
“That means every single day four families, like mine, have to say goodbye to someone they love.”
Fisher challenged the students to commit to saying “no” to impaired driving every single day of their lives.
MADD Williams Lake Chapter president Pam Herman said in someways she would like the organization to be called People Against Drunk Driving.