Funeral Home Dead On In #idrivetextfree Campaign: Watch

A western Michigan funeral home wants to wake teens and their families up to the deadly consequences of texting and driving, estimated to claim 3,000 U.S. teenagers’ lives a year. (Screenshot: Cook Funeral Home video)

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So, you still don’t believe texting and driving is a deadly combination?

Ask someone who knows a lot about death – in this case, a western Michigan funeral home that plans to launch its #idrivetextfree social media campaign Grandville High Schools opening football clash Thursday night.

Cook Funeral Home not only chose the right moment, but also the right audience for its campaign launch. The video shows a crash scene, then a boy wearing a high school football jersey who awakes in a coffin at his own funeral. He pleads to take back a simple text he was sending to his mother – who, he reveals in his panicked narrative, he had seen texting and driving many times before.

“I said I would be home in five minutes,” the boy cries out. “I’ve seen you do it. I’ve been in the car when some of you were doing it. It was just one text.”

The boy could be any high school student in America, the parents anyone who ever sent a text while driving. In social media parlance: Boom.

“Sadly, we see a lot of young people come through the funeral home,” Bob Kreter, Cook’s marketing manager, told MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. “When you hear of teenagers dying from texting while driving, it’s horrible.”

Texting and driving is the leading cause of fatal accidents involving teenage drivers, according to researchers at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park, NY, Newsday reported last year.

“Our experience with the tragedy of young deaths motivates us to address this growing epidemic.” – Ron Cook, vice president, Cook Funeral Home

More than 3,000 annual teen deaths and 300,000 injuries nationwide are attributed to texting and driving. The habit, which 31 percent of drivers ages 18-64 reported they engaged in when surveyed for 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, overtaking drunken driving as the leading cause of teen traffic deaths, the Cohen researchers said.

Ron Cook told MLive/The Grand Rapids Press that he and others at the funeral home have seen the human toll behind those statistics too many times not to act.

“Our experience with the tragedy of young deaths motivates us to address this growing epidemic,” said Cook, the vice president of the mortuary company that operates chapels in three western Michigan communities. “We feel we have a unique opportunity, as a funeral home, to reach students in an impactful way.”

As part of the campaign, the mortuary will distribute T-shirts and wristbands with the #idrivetextfree hashtag at the football game, while asking people to take a pledge not to text and drive. More presentations are planned throughout the region throughout the football season.

“We see a lot of death,” Kreter added. “We want to save lives.”