Politics & Government

A Father's Fight Against Underage Drinking

Jeff Levy, commissioner of the Fairfax County Oversight Committee on Drinking and Driving, spoke to parents and teens at a Citizens Advisory Committee meeting about his son's death.

During Jeff Levy's last conversation with his son, he asked Jon, a sophomore at Radford University, if he would ever get in a car with a drunk driver. 

"I’ll always remember the last words that my son said to me...'Trust me, Dad, I know better.' Those were the last words  I remember my son saying on Wednesday night," said Levy. "And I really did trust him, and he really did know better. Sober."

By Friday night, Jon was dead. He had gone to a Halloween party and then gotten into a car with a drunk driver, and one other student in the back seat. 

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"They were last seen going up over a hill between between Radford and Virginia Tech," Levy said of that night in October 1997. "And the witnesses said they were going somewhere between 85 and 100 miles an hour and they were over the double yellow line. They went over the hill. Hit head-on another car."

Since that day, Levy has made it his mission to spread the word about college drinking. A resident of the Mount Vernon area, Levy is the commissioner of the Fairfax County Oversight Committee on Drinking and Driving. He also does presentations about four times a month with the Unified Prevention Coalition of Fairfax County on the "." At a Tuesday meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee at the , he shared his story. 

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"There wasn’t enough left of my son or the driver to make an identification," Levy said. "So they didn’t notify me until about 10 o’clock the next morning. They had to take tatters of his Halloween costume back to where they rented the costumes to determine who it was."

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In high school, no one would have guessed that Jon's life would become a cautionary tale. He was a popular student who played football, baseball and basketball. 

"He was a kid that I was very proud of. I’ll be the first one to tell you that there were times in high school, where he came home, he’d obviously had a couple beers, or he’d been drinking," Levy said.

"And his mom and I, we went nuts and so forth. We yelled and screamed 'you’re grounded,' we took the keys away. But the message was clear, that it was kind of expected and accepted behavior, that all the kids were doing it. And so we went through the motions."

When Jon got to college, things got out of control. He had "a couple incidents that we found out later," Levy said. At the end of the year, Jon drove through a fence and got a DUI. 

"We finally learned our lesson and put our foot down and said that’s it, no more. You can't do this anymore. There are consequences to your actions. We brought him home and told him, you’re not going back to school until you’ve really cleaned up your act," Levy said. "Until you’ve tested free from drugs and alcohol...and you know why you’re going to school."

That summer, Jon took two jobs, paid off all the damages related to the accident and the DUI. He told Levy that he wanted to go into business with him. At the end of August, he tested clean.

"We were convinced that he had learned his lesson," Levy said. 

What he and his wife didn't appreciate, Levy said, was the binge  rampant on many campuses across the country. Every year, 1,825 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related, unintentional injuries, according to the National Institute for Alcohol and Abuse and Alcoholism. Another 599,000 students between 18 and 24 are unintentionally injured while under the influence of alcohol. 

Levy said that parents are the key to preventing underage drinking. He cited research that 70 percent of students say their parents are the most influential person in their life. He urged parents to tell their children that any form of drinking is unacceptable for anyone under age 21. The science, he said, shows that alcohol is especially dangerous for minors because their brains are not finished developing. 

What's more, binge drinking has grown more commonplace over the years. The driver of the car that Jon Levy died in had the equivalent of over 20 martinis in his body—but had only been drinking for 50 minutes. That type of heavy drinking is not an anamoly on college campuses.

The decision made that October night in 1997 had a ripple effect. Levy said that Jon's sister was close to her brother and "kind of went to her room after my son’s death and didn’t come out for two years." One of Jon's best friends, depressed by the death, committed suicide just weeks after the crash. Jon's girlfriend blamed herself for allowing him to get in the car, and three years later, had an emotional breakdown.

Another student, who had ridden in the back seat of the car, was in such bad condition at the scene that medical personnel initially thought he was dead and placed him in a body bag. He spent six weeks in a coma, had 100 broken bones, internal injuries, lost an eye and part of his foot and suffered severe brain damage. 

The driver of the other car died that night. 

"She left behind five older kids. She had a class that day and went to the mall to buy a gift for her daughter who was having a baby shower that night. But she never made it," Levy said. "Also ironically, she’d never had a drink in her life. She was a teetotaler, religious. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Levy said that he keeps telling his son's story because he wants parents and teens to understand what they may be up against. He doesn't want any other students to get sucked into the drinking scene. 

"It was a Halloween party," Levy said. "'We’re going to have fun.' And look at the story we’re left to tell."

 

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