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| Howard and Dawn Mauer, who lost their daughter, Deanna, to a distracted driver, waved the flag to start the 2019 Monster Energy Cup Series Auto Club 400. Photo; Tom Stahler |
Waving the green flag to an onrush of thundering Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series cars, coming to the line, should be the experience of a lifetime for anyone invited to do so as an honored guest. For Howard Mauer, the experience was melancholy at best. Mauer, who with his wife Dawn, attended Sunday’s Auto Club 400 at California Speedway here in Fontana, was there for a much more profound reason than being honored or starting the race.
In April of 2011 Howard and Dawn Mauer received the horrific news that their daughter, Deanna, had been in a terrible crash on the 405 Freeway in Orange County, California. The happy 23-year old, with a whole life ahead, had succumbed to her injuries. Deanna was the victim of one of the earliest and most high-profile cases of distracted driving.
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| Dawn Mauer was a star softball player at San Jose State and was coaching at San Juan Hills High School. Photo AAA |
The offender, 29-year old Jorene Ypanto Nicolas, a single mother from Westminster, texting and looking at her phone, hurled down the freeway at 85 miles per hour in her Toyota Prius. Because her focus was on her phone and not on the road ahead, she did not see that traffic had come to a complete stop. Nicolas, according to officials, never even hit the brakes as she plowed into Mauer’s Hyundai.
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| The wreck of Dawn Mauer's Hyundai. Photo AAA |
At Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, the stoic couple stood on the stage, along with celebrities, to greet the Monster Energy Cup drivers during pre-race introductions. Treated as honored guests of the AAA Auto Club, who have teamed up with the Mauers to perpetuate awareness of distracted driving, it addressed an epidemic thart is killing many on the road unnecessarily. For those in the crowd that observed the Mauers, they saw a couple whose happiness was just gone. At no point did either one of them smile. The devastation of losing their only child to the meaningless exercise of answering a text message. Now they are merely left with their memories and activism to serve as a warning to others.
“It took six years for her to admit that she was wrong,” said Dawn Mauer in the AAA Press conference. This refers to the first trial, where Nichols pled not-guilty to charges of vehicular manslaughter, but was found guilty by the jury and sentenced to the maximum six-year prison term. However, the conviction was overturned on appeal and set for re-trial in early 2017. Rather than go through a lengthy retrial, in a plea deal, Nichols pled guilty to the manslaughter charge, was credited for time served and released. The single mother-turned felon gave a tearful apology to the sad parents during the second sentencing. For the Mauers, this brought closure, but of course would never bring their daughter back.
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| Monster Energy Cup Series cars cross the start-finish line at Auto Club Speedway during the Auto Club 400. Photo Tom Stahler |
“Do you want to take a child away from a parent? Does somebody really want to do that you know? Or take a mother away from her kids? That’s what it is. That’s what can be,” ached Dawn Mauer. "I hope people realize it’s a choice they make when they get into that car, whether they are going to look at that phone or text, or not, because they can stop from hurting somebody else.”
The AAA Auto Club partnered with the Mauers in a “Don’t Drive Intoxicated, Don’t Drive In-TEXT-icated” campaign. Recent studies have shown that distracted driving has overtaken drunk driving as the leading cause of accidents with injuries and fatalities. Isn’t that a good enough reason to deal with that text message later?
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