By Mike Chalmers
USA Today
WASHINGTON — As chief of the Magnolia Volunteer Fire Company in Delaware’s Kent County, Kevin Sipple has seen firsthand how long it can take authorities to notify a crash victim’s family.
“The only resource we have now is their driver’s license with an address on it,” Sipple said.
So when he took his son to get his driver’s license Tuesday, Delaware’s new Next of Kin Registry caught his attention. He and his son both registered names and phone numbers of family members whom police can contact in case of an emergency.
Delaware became the latest state to launch a next-of-kin registry on Monday. By Wednesday, more than 850 people had registered with the program, said Pam Lilly, chief of customer relations for the Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles.
The New Jersey state Assembly is scheduled to vote on a similar program today, according to Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat from Middlesex County. If passed, the bill will go to the governor.
Florida was the first state DMV to launch such a site in 2006, and more than 4 million people have taken advantage of it, the state’s DMV reports. Others have followed, including Ohio (2008) Colorado (2009), Illinois (2009) and Indiana (2010). Some DMVs, including Virginia’s, link to the national non-profit Next of Kin Registry.
“It’s super, super simple,” said Delaware DMV Director Jennifer Cohen. “We really want to push it hard for our teens and our senior population.”
Florida and Ohio created their registries in response to fatal crashes in which family members weren’t notified for hours. Linda Wuestenberg of Columbus, Ohio, said it took authorities seven hours to notify her of the 2007 accident that killed her son, Steven Burge, 33. At first, she was angry about the delay. Then she discovered the only information police had was Burge’s address on his driver’s license.
She learned that officers combed through records and phone books, went to his home, searched for a neighbor with a key, called the last number dialed on his cellphone and, finally, contacted his employer, who looked up his personnel records.
“They worked tremendously hard to track me down,” Wuestenberg said.
Such efforts are not uncommon, said Delaware State Police Sgt. Paul Shavack. “It can take hours or up to a day to find someone,” he said.
Wuestenberg said she learned about Florida’s registry from Christine Olson, whose 22-year-old daughter, Tiffiany, died instantly in a 2005 crash. Olson said she did not learn of the accident until 6 1/2 hours later.
“If she had been alive for any amount of time, I would have wanted to be with her,” she said.
Wisniewski introduced his New Jersey bill last year in memory of 19-year-old Sara Dubinin, who died from injuries suffered in a September 2007 crash. Two hours after the crash, authorities had not yet notified her parents when one of Sara’s friends called her mother, Betty Dubinin, to ask about her condition. By the time the Dubinins reached the hospital, Sara had slipped into a coma.
“I wanted to be there to let her know she’s not alone, that Mom was there,” Betty Dubinin said. “To not be there when she needed me most is the source of a lot of guilt for me.”
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