By Doug Smith, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Lutzie 43 Foundation
This series has always been built on an argument: that roadway safety is a corporate responsibility issue, that the data demands it, and that the philanthropic attention this cause receives is wildly out of proportion to the lives it costs us every year.
But arguments, even compelling ones, have limits. What moves people, what has always moved me, are the stories. The faces behind the numbers. The people who lived through something no one should have to live through and then chose to turn that experience into something that might protect someone else.
Last summer, I traveled to Minneapolis for the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety (NETS) Annual Meeting. Earlier this year, I attended the 2026 Lifesavers Conference in Baltimore. And this spring, the Lutzie 43 Foundation awarded its annual Prepared For Life (PFL) Scholarships to students across the country who are committed to roadway safety advocacy as they pursue their education.
Three remarkable individuals from those events and experiences have stuck with me. I want to introduce you to them, because they make the case and my point better than any statistic I could share or cite.
But first: a word about the current moment we’re in.
The 100 Deadliest Days Are Not a Future Risk. They’re Happening Now.
The stretch from Memorial Day to Labor Day is known in traffic safety circles as the 100 Deadliest Days. The name is earned. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, this period sees a significant spike in fatal crashes, particularly involving teen drivers, who die at a rate roughly 26% higher during these months than the rest of the year. Impaired driving surges around holiday weekends. Distracted driving is constant. Fatigue is invisible but everywhere.
Your employees are on those roads. Their kids are on those roads. And the cultural permission we give ourselves in summer, to stay out a little later, to drive home from events we shouldn’t, to assume that good weather means safer conditions, is exactly the kind of permission that kills people.
The 100 Deadliest Days are not a teen driving problem. They are an everyone problem. And they are, without question, a corporate responsibility problem. I am proud that the Lutzie 43 Foundation has joined with the National Road Safety Foundation (NRSF) in a a mission to change these weeks to the “100 Safest Days of Summer”. You can learn more about the NRSF and their mission at nrsf.org.
Now. The people.
Pam O’Donnell and the Catch You Later Foundation
When I met with Pam O’Donnell ahead of the NETS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis last summer, I already knew her name. At the event, she would deliver a keynote that stopped the room cold, the line I have never forgotten:
“If 35,000 plus people die each year from anything else, we would call it an epidemic and take immediate and massive action to correct it, NOW!”
What I didn’t fully know yet was the story behind it.
On February 22, 2016, Pam’s husband Tim, 48 years old, and their youngest daughter Bridget, who was five, were killed at a toll plaza on the New Jersey Turnpike. Tim was slowing to approach the booth at Interchange 14C when a driver named Scott Hahn, impaired by GHB and amphetamines, traveling an estimated 53 miles per hour in a five-mile-per-hour zone, slammed into the back of their car with such force that it was propelled through the toll plaza and into oncoming traffic, where it was struck head-on by an ambulance. Tim was killed instantly. Bridget died on the way to the hospital. Hahn was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to 37 years in prison.
Pam had previously survived a severe battle with brain cancer. She was left to raise her one surviving daughter alone.
She didn’t step back from the world. She founded the Catch You Later Foundation in Tim and Bridget’s memory and became one of the most prominent roadway safety speakers in the country, bringing her story, unflinching and unsparing, to teenagers, adults, corporations, and policymakers across New Jersey and beyond – including becoming the first civilian certified to be an instructor at the New Jersey State Police Academy.
Hearing from her in Minneapolis, I was struck by something: her story is not about grief. It is about refusal. A refusal to let what happened to her family be absorbed quietly into the statistics, to be normalized away, to be called an accident and forgotten.
That refusal is exactly the posture I am asking Corporate America to adopt.
Tess Rowland: From the Crash Scene to the National Stage
I met Tess Rowland at the 2026 Lifesavers Conference, and like many people in that room listening to the panel discussion she was a part of, she carries her story in a way that makes you understand immediately why she does what she does.
On May 4, 2021, Tess was 22 years old and working as a morning news reporter in Panama City Beach, Florida. Around 2:00 a.m., while commuting to work, a pickup truck entered the wrong side of the highway and struck her head-on. First responders later said they were shocked she had not been decapitated. The engine block of her car was pushed to within an inch of her body. The driver, celebrating his 22nd birthday, with a blood-alcohol level one and a half times the legal limit, walked away uninjured. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Tess survived. Eight major surgeries (with more likely). Emergency intestinal surgery. Catastrophic injuries to her right leg and arm that doctors said might never fully recover. She underwent intensive rehabilitation, defied those expectations, and eventually ran a half-marathon.
She then left journalism entirely and walked into full-time traffic safety advocacy. She went on to serve as National President for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
What Tess represents, and what I saw clearly at Lifesavers, is the kind of voice that changes rooms. She is not a spokesperson. She is a witness. And her presence in the national conversation about impaired driving is exactly the kind of momentum that corporate investment can amplify, sustain, and scale.
Miss Savannah Hughes & the Lutzie 43 Foundation’s Prepared For Life (PFL) Scholarship
Not every story in this space begins with survival. Some begin with loss, and with a young person deciding that loss will not be the end of the story.
Miss Savannah Hughes is one of the Lutzie 43 Foundation’s 2026 Prepared For Life (PFL) Scholarship recipients. Two years ago, she lost her father in a crash caused by a drunk driver.
She is now pursuing her education, with anticipated enrollment at the University of Alabama, and she is doing it as someone who understands, in the most personal way possible, what is at stake on every road, every day.
The PFL Scholarship exists for students like Savannah: young people who have been touched by roadway tragedy and who are committed to carrying the message of safe driving forward as they build their lives. It is an investment not just in their education, but in the next generation of advocates, people who will spend their careers, their communities, and their conversations making the roads safer for everyone around them.
This is one of the clearest and most direct ways Corporate America can invest in roadway safety: fund the people who are already living this mission. Savannah Hughes is preparing for life. She is doing it with intention, with purpose, and with a story that should make every corporate philanthropic leader ask: what are we doing to support young people like her?
What These Three Stories Have in Common
Pam O’Donnell lost her husband and her daughter. Tess Rowland nearly lost her life. Savannah Hughes lost her father. All three of these tragedies were preventable. Every single one of them was caused by a choice, a bad, avoidable, consequential choice, that someone made behind the wheel.
And all three of these women refused to let that be the end of the sentence.
That refusal is the spirit behind the Lutzie 43 Foundation and behind the 43 Key Seconds (Clear Head, Clear Hands, Clear Eyes, Click It) message. It is also the spirit I am asking Corporate America to carry. Not because it is easy or because the return is obvious, but because the alternative, silence, inaction, and the quiet assumption that these things happen to other people, is no longer acceptable.
What the 100 Deadliest Days Ask of You Right Now
We are in the heart of the most dangerous driving season of the year. Here is what an intentional, responsible corporate response looks like:
- Name the 100 Deadliest Days internally. Send a message to your workforce. Tell them the roads are statistically more dangerous from Memorial Day through Labor Day and that you care about them getting home.
- If you have summer events, picnics, happy hours, outings, build a 43 Key Seconds (Clear Head, Clear Hands, Clear Eyes, Click It) moment into them. Forty-three seconds before people leave. It travels home with them.
- Invest in the Prepared For Life Scholarship or a program like it. Fund the next generation of roadway safety advocates, young people who are turning personal tragedy into public purpose.
- Bring a Safe Driving Summit to a community where your employees live, work, and play. The Lutzie 43 Foundation’s licensed summits change behavior. The stories in this article are proof of what that work produces.
- Make roadway safety a named priority in your next CSR report. Not a footnote. A commitment.
The voices I have shared today, Pam, Tess, Savannah, are not cautionary tales. They are a challenge. They chose to act. They are asking, in their own ways, whether you will too.
The most dangerous thing your employees do every day should not be the one thing your company refuses to address.
It starts with 43 Key Seconds. It starts with a conversation. It starts with a decision, made right now, to not wait.
Hopeful,
Doug
doug@lutzie43.org | www.lutzie43.org
References
- AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. “100 Deadliest Days.” AAA NewsRoom. https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/100-deadliest-days/
- O’Donnell, Pam. Catch You Later Foundation. https://morristowngreen.com/2025/05/15/easily-distracted-share-this-moms-cautionary-tale-with-your-teens-and-program-77-on-your-phone/
- “Man Who Killed Bayonne Man and Daughter in Turnpike Crash Sentenced to 37 Years in Prison.” Hudson County View, 2019. https://hudsoncountyview.com/man-who-killed-bayonne-man-and-daughter-in-turnpike-crash-sentenced-to-37-years-in-prison/
- O’Donnell, Pam. National Safety Council Distracted Driving Survivors Network. https://www.nsc.org/road/resources/distracted-driving-survivors-network/pam-o-donnell
- Rowland, Tess. “I Was Almost Killed by a Drunk Driver. Here’s How It Changed My Life.” Today, 2023. https://www.today.com/news/essay/almost-killed-drunk-driver-life-rcna70993
- “Drunk Driver Sentenced After Injuring Former TV Anchor in Crash.” WJHG News, July 21, 2023. https://www.wjhg.com/2023/07/21/drunk-driver-sentenced-after-injuring-former-tv-anchor-crash/
- State Attorney’s Office, 14th Circuit. “3-Year Sentence for Drunk Driver Who Badly Injured Former TV Anchor in Wreck.” July 21, 2023. https://sa14.fl.gov/2023/07/21/3-year-sentence-for-drunk-driver-who-badly-injured-former-tv-anchor-in-wreck/
This Article Is Part of a Continuing Series, “My Challenge to Corporate America.” Explore the Series:
Part 2 – The Real Cost of Employee Roadway Incidents: What Companies Don’t See
Part 3 – Roadway Safety: The Overlooked Philanthropic Opportunity in Corporate America
Part 4 – Driving Is the Most Dangerous Thing We All Do Daily, So Why Don’t Companies Address It?
Part 5 – The Power of Early Adopters: How Leading Companies Shape a Safer Future