The youngest member of road victim support group ROLO, Melissa Looby has lost five of her friends in as many years. She talks about the impact of these road deaths and the need for everyone to heed the road safety message.

By Tim Smith

There are times Melissa Looby fears the worst whenever the phone rings.

To lose one friend to a fatal road accident was bad enough, but Melissa has faced that tragedy five times in less than five years. The 20-year-old has been left wondering whether the run will ever end.

Miss Looby was in Bolivia three years ago when her best friend Shellee Smith lost her life in a crash in Smith's. Her mom only had to say Shellee's name over the phone and Miss Looby knew what had happened.

Shellee, 18, was the third friend of Miss Looby killed on Bermuda's roads in just over two years. In the three years since then, road accidents have claimed the lives of two more of her loved ones.

As a member of road safety group ROLO, The Royal Gazette contacted Miss Looby for reaction when Bermuda suffered its tenth road accident of 2008 earlier this month.

Before she even answered the phone, she'd guessed yet another motorist had been killed. This time she didn't know the victim, but she knew only too well the pain Emanuel Pereira's family and friends would be going through.

"It's so bad, it's something you grow into," Miss Looby told this newspaper.

"I lost my first one when I was 16 in a car accident. From there, it was just continuous. You wake up expecting to hear something. Everybody is sad, but it's so common you just expect it."

For the past few weeks, the Road Safety Council and ROLO — which stands for Remembering Our Loved Ones, a charity supporting families of road accident victims — has been urging people to drive more carefully.

Members are horrified at the spate of road deaths Bermuda has witnessed in 2008, with ten in three and a half months since Miguel Franco was killed in March.

ROLO sends gift baskets to grieving families, inviting them to join the group at meetings where they can express their feelings and share emotions with others who have been through similar experiences.

Miss Looby's personal tragedies were Oshea Stowe in July 2003, Krystle Maya Babon in March 2005, Shellee in September 2005, Stephen Lee in January 2007 and Shannon Nusum in March 2007.

All have been difficult to deal with, but one of the toughest was Shellee, whose death Miss Looby learned about while she was on an exchange trip in Bolivia.

"Being in Bolivia was the hardest part," she said. "She died on the Friday and I couldn't get back on the Island until Tuesday. If you talk to anybody who's experienced somebody being in an accident, you want to get home as soon as you can. I felt like everybody was at home and they had each other.

"Getting home, initially you feel better, but then at the same time you realise this is where you deal with the person you have lost. I went straight to her mom's house. It was just weird, sitting there. Everybody still can't cope with the fact that she's not going to walk through the door."

Miss Looby says that although the inquest has not yet taken place, witnesses say her friend was not driving recklessly.

She said: "When she first died, a lot of people kept saying: 'Why her?' That's still a question. Why her? It comes down to belief at times: God thinks it's her time to go. I have become a believer in that."

The loss of Shellee makes it even more difficult to accept when other people die through their own carelessness.

"It switches when you have someone riding down the road at 2.30 a.m. drunk or speeding. It switches for me because they have taken it out of God's hands," she said.

"It puts everything in perspective for you. You know you have lost somebody and she wasn't doing anything to bring the accident on, and then you have somebody who, in a sense, it could have been avoided."

Being part of ROLO — of which she is the youngest member — has helped Miss Looby as much as it has helped other people.

"At ROLO, we just had a meeting where we shared all of our stories with each other," she said.

"In a sense, it made me feel better to see that everybody feels the same things I did. Anybody who hasn't lost someone, to sit in that meeting, they would have been mind-blown by the emotion that was felt.

"From my own experience, you don't know how it feels until you go through it yourself. People my age, until I see it myself, it's not going to impact me that much. I know that's how I was. I wasn't one to speed, but you just aren't sensitive to it until you go through it yourself and see the pain that everybody has to deal with.

"I'm happy I joined because it did make me realise some things. I thought I was over losing Stephen and Shellee and Shannon but, sitting in that meeting where we shared with everybody our stories, I saw I wasn't.

"You sit there and you know you all have the same objectives, just baring our souls in a sense — it really brought us a lot closer as a group."

Miss Looby is afraid this summer's constant message has fallen on deaf ears, and urges people, particularly young motorists like herself, to take heed.

She explained: "I keep hearing the warnings out to young people and then I hear young people responding and saying: 'It's not just young people — the majority of people losing their lives are over 30.'

"I think we still need young people to understand that our road behaviours are cultivated at a period of time when we are young. By the time we get to the age of 35, we start to relax a bit and start thinking we've had two drinks so we'll be OK.

"It can happen to anybody. It doesn't matter how long you have been driving. I watch people ride — people say stuff like: 'I was late to work, I had to speed.' The day after an accident, I see people overtake. You can overtake, sure, but when you overtake two or three buses at a time....

"People need to stop saying 'not me' because it can happen to anyone."