Tonawanda High School student Leah Lichtenberger “died” recently when she was struck by a classmate who was driving drunk.
Fortunately for her family and friends, Lichtenberger’s “death” was fake. She was acting in a film on drinking and driving, which was produced by THS students Brielle Clontz and Jill Idziak.
The students showed the 20-minute film to the entire school during an emotional assembly Wednesday afternoon. In the video, a dozen students gather at the house of a classmate whose parents are out of town. While the other students are playing beer pong and other drinking games, Lichtenberger is shown drinking Hi-C.
Her and her boyfriend get into an argument over the fact that he’s drunk and wants to drive home, but she won’t let him. “All I wanna do is party!” her boyfriend yells, drawing laughs from the assembly crowd. What happens shortly thereafter brought tears to many students watching the film.
After the party host’s parents call to say they’re on their way home unexpectedly soon, the party-goers scatter out of the house and hop into their vehicles. In the next scene, Lichtenberger is walking along the sidewalk when one of the teens strikes her. As The Verve Pipe’s song “The Freshmen” plays, the students gather over Lichtenberger’s lifeless body and watch in horror as she’s loaded onto a stretcher and taken away by Twin City Ambulance.
Meanwhile, City of Tonawanda Police Officer Brian Scarpena conducts field sobriety tests on the drunken driver, who is handcuffed and escorted to the police cruiser while the party-goers sit on the curb, hanging their heads.
As stirring as the film was, the hundreds of students gathered in the auditorium Wednesday heard a much more jarring tale. While what happened to Lichtenberger in the video was emotional, it at least didn’t actually happen.
Bobby Petrocelli, unfortunately, could not say the same about his wife, Ava, who was killed by a drunk driver who crashed his full-size Ford F-150 into the Petrocellis’ Texas home in 1986. The couple met in college and were married only two years when the accident occurred.
Ever since, Petrocelli has shared his tragic story with millions of high school students across the country, imploring to teens that 10 seconds — the time it took the pickup driver to crash into the Petrocellis’ home — is all it takes to change their life and the lives of others.
“All it took, literally, was 10 seconds and my life was changed forever,” Petrocelli told the kids, many of whom were wiping tears from their eyes.
Petrocelli began his energetic speech with humorous lines about life growing up in Brooklyn and his college years.
“I had the privilege of cramming a four-year education into five years,” and “I graduated from college in the top 10 percent of the bottom third of my class” drew hearty laughter.
Sixteen minutes into his presentation, though, the mood turned somber as Petrocelli told in vivid detail of the night of the crash that took his wife’s life. The 35-year-old driver was more than twice legally drunk when he came barreling toward the Petrocellis’ home at 70 mph as they slept just five feet from the brick wall he would plow through.
“The truck crashes through the house, runs me over completely, flips me up on the hood of the truck,” Petrocelli said. “The truck lands on Ava, crashes through the next wall, through the dining room table, throws me into the dining room window and finally comes to rest in the living room.”
Ava was pinned underneath the truck and it took paramedics a half hour to get her out. “For me, the most horrible site I ever remember seeing was driving away from my house, looking out the back windows of an ambulance, seeing my whole back brick bedroom wall is missing,” he said.
A priest approached Petrocelli later that night at his hospital bed to deliver the tragic news that his wife had died. Days later, while visiting the cemetery where Ava Petrocelli was buried, Petrocelli had the epiphany that has come to define his life’s work of the past 16 years.
One-thousand students from Santa Fe High School — where he taught and coached football — traveled 100 miles round trip to console Petrocelli. He said he wouldn’t be alive today were it not for the strength and support they provided, and he’s spent his time traveling around the country trying to influence high schoolers to feel loved and make the right decisions as a way to return the favor. He now lives in Florida with his current wife, Sue, and two boys.
Petrocelli told the students that he missed out on his chance to play professional baseball because he couldn’t hit a curve ball.
“When life threw me a curve ball, I hit that ball for one reason: I was prepared to hit it by the decisions I’ve made, by the epiphanies I’ve listened to and by the life that I live.”
After Petrocelli implored the teens to “take 10 seconds to change a life,” they sprung from their seats and applauded.
“It really hit home, especially as a senior,” Ashley Morris said afterward. She said Petrocelli’s speech has inspired her to change the way she acts and treats other people.
Sophomore Brielle Clontz helped bring Petrocelli to Tonawanda after learning about him at a leadership conference, where she also learned about the “Shattered Dreams” program that inspired her and Idziak, a senior, to create their movie. Brielle’s father, Robert Clontz, is a lieutenant with the City of Tonawanda Police and asked officer Scarpena and Twin City Ambulance if they could take a few minutes to participate in the film.
Brielle Clontz and Idziak, as well as their Student Leadership Class advisor, Kate Ellis, were amazed at how the audience reacted to both presentations.
“Our school has never been united like that before,” Idziak said.
Contact reporter David J. Hill at 693-1000, ext. 115.
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