Mothers Who Lost Children in Car Accidents Warn Oxford Teens

When Ryan Ramirez was a toddler, he would say, “I love you, mom, as big as the sky,” Sherry Chapman, his mother, said at an assembly held Friday to show teens the harsh realities of unsafe driving.

“That was our little thing,” Chapman told the grade 9-12 student body. “He never said goodbye. His way of saying goodbye was, “I love you mom.’”

Ramirez told his mom he loved her one final time on Dec. 7, 2002, when he was killed in a car accident in Vernon. The driver was drunk at the time, but Ramirez, a front-seat passenger, was not, Chapman said. The driver, who went to jail for five years, survived, as did the other passenger.

When coroners brought Chapman in to see Ramirez’s body, she said she muttered, “I love you, Ryan, as big as the sky,” as her tears dropped into his face.

“It’s just impossible to tell you how special Ryan was and still is to me,” she said.

The that has been held at Oxford High School in an attempt to make teens realize the importance of safe driving. The first was organized in the fall after two separate car accidents involving OHS students. One of them, 18-year-old senior, was in critical condition for a week at the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven before being released to a rehabilitation facility and eventually to his home.

Local emergency responders and school officials say they never want another student to suffer the way Inzitari did, and therefore have begun the safe driving programs that the school board says will be mandated in order for students to obtain parking permits.

The first safe driving program focused on laws, while Friday’s assembly showed the human side accidents, Principal Frank Savo said. He said he believes programs like these are “very effective.”

“This was a small part of what we do with teen driving awareness,” he said. “This is what happens when we make decisions as drivers.”

Bad decisions can cause lifelong pain and suffering, as students learned from Chapman and another speaker who lost two children in the same car accident.

Chapman said Ryan is her only son and the two share the same birthday.

“I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore, because it was always about Ryan,” Chapman said. “…I cannot go to weddings, I did attend one but I couldn’t stand the mother-son dance.”

Another speaker, Donna Jenner, had two children die in a car accident in Wolcott in October 2007.

Her son, Anthony Apruzzese, 17, and her daughter, 14-year-old Jessica Apruzzese, died in a crash along with a friend, 15-year-old Thamara Buarque Correa. Anthony Apruzzese, who had a history of speeding, was driving the car on a sunny weekday morning.

His mother described the horrific scene to wide-eyed Oxford students.

After the accident, she said EMTs brought her into the back of ambulance, and she kept asking whether the teens were OK. The response: “I’m sorry; they’re gone,” she said.

“You know that expression time heals all wounds?,” she asked rhetorically. “Guess what, they lied, because there are some wounds that just won’t ever, ever heal.

“I can tell you that if anything was to happen to any one of you, your friends, your family, your teachers and people whose lives you didn’t even realized you’ve touched, they would be left with the biggest holes in their hearts and it would never go away.”