Tough Love or Too Much?

When California Highway Patrol Officer Eric Newbury visited El Camino High School on May 26, he had some bad news.
He told students that 17-year-old senior Brittany Bennett, editor of the school newspaper was killed by a drunk driver.
Newbury read a brief eulogy, placed a rose on Bennett's seat, then left the students, some in tears, to think about the death of their classmate.
Newbury went to several classrooms telling kids the same thing.
An hour later all the students were called to the football field and told the whole thing was a hoax. Bennett did not die, nor did any of the other students whose names Newbury used to make his hoax hit home.
Newbury said that if even one student thinks twice before driving drunk, the scare he put in the kids was worth it.
Some parents complained that the kids have been traumatized, Newbury says "what I'm doing is waking them up.
“If I sit there and lecture somebody in a nice way, it's going to go in one ear and out the other,” he said. “In today's world, where they have all sorts of gore and fantastic things that kids can access on the computer, if you want to compete with that, you have to jar them emotionally.
“I want them to be an emotional wreck. I don't want them to have to live through this for real.”
Newbury's father was killed by a drunk driver.
The program, titled “Every 15 Minutes,” was designed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Its title refers to the frequency in which a person somewhere in the country dies in an alcohol-related traffic accident.
More people die in traffic accidents each year than have died during the entire 5 years of the Iraq war.