By Jeri Rowe
News & Record
Copyright 2007 News & Record
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Zim has seen it too much.
An unbuckled seatbelt. A dead teenager from a local high school. Beer cans in the back. And a crying parent, standing at the scene, saying repeatedly to the firefighters pumping on the child’s chest, “Don’t let my baby die!”
Sound like Hollywood? Not to Zim.
Capt. Steve Zimmerman — a 25-year veteran with the Greensboro Fire Department, a father of two — has seen it so much that he can rattle off the location, the high school and the parents’ first names.
So, in 1998, he started VIP for a VIP. It’s shorthand for Vehicle Injury Prevention for a Very Important Person, a driving-awareness program he has taken to 13 Guilford County high schools.
Now his nonprofit is stretching onto college campuses and beyond our borders.
It’s meant to help shake awake a generation that often sees itself as bulletproof.
Zimmerman took his program last week to UNCG. In November, he’ll take it to Trinity High, followed by Western Alamance and trips to Asheboro, Asheville and possibly Wilmington.
To pull it off, he hauls around a recently donated 36-foot trailer. It’s chock-full of ladders, lights, speakers, a broken telephone pole and a wrecked GMC Envoy, a four-door sedan where two local teenagers were last seen alive.
It’s a tough job.
Our next generation — ages 16 to 24 — represents 14 percent of the U.S. population. Yet, they are involved in 28 percent of all alcohol-related driving accidents.
In 2006, the most recent information available, the Centers for Disease Control found 10 percent of high school students reported driving a car or other vehicle during the past 30 days when they had been drinking alcohol.
And 29 percent of high school students reported riding in a vehicle during the past 30 days with a driver who had been drinking alcohol.
Those figures are daunting. But not to Zimmerman, 47, a second-generation firefighter.
In the cab of his truck, he stores enough rescue equipment - an oxygen bottle, a fire extinguisher, full turnout gear, you name it - to help anyone at a moment’s notice.
And whenever he can, he works on his VIP for a VIP. He started it after seeing a teenage girl die in a car accident 11 years ago beneath a highway bridge. She was from Northeast Guilford High, his alma mater.
State Insurance Commissioner Jim Long supports Zimmerman. So do 31 sponsors and supporters that run the gamut - from the Highway Patrol and the High Point Fire Department to a local orthodontist and a funeral home.
Zimmerman needs the funeral home.
It donates the casket for the two-hour program. Then come the talk, the statistics and the re-creation of an alcohol-related accident that’s all too real.
You wonder if it’s enough.
But last week, in front of UNCG’s Elliott University Center, off-duty cops, paramedics and firefighters scurried around that wrecked GMC Envoy to help a teenager trapped in the car.
A crowd of at least 100 students didn’t move. They whispered to themselves and watched. A few even cried.
Meanwhile, over a loud speaker, an actor narrated the entire scene. He was acting as the driver’s conscience. Zimmerman wrote the script himself.
“I don’t want to see another kid die,’' Zimmerman, the father of a 16-year-old son, said Wednesday. “I’ve done everything in Steve Zimmerman’s power to save another life. They haven’t learned yet, and now, Austin is 16, and I don’t want to see him — or anyone else — die for not putting on a seatbelt.
“It’s a simple little thing. I’ve got the background. I’ve seen it. And I don’t want to see it anymore.’'