MORGUE BECOMES CLASSROOM FOR YOUNG SUBSTANCE ABUSERS

CROWN POINT -- Fourteen young men and women stood on the floor of the
Lake County Coroner's morgue around the pale, mangled corpse of a
Saturday morning accident victim.

"It stops here," investigator George Deliopoulos said after unzipping
the body bag and giving his audience a view of everything, but the
victim's face, which was covered with a towel. "No one close their
eyes," barked Robert Moore, a Crown Point police patrolman.

The captive audience is taking part in Preventing Addictive Toxic
Habits (PATH), a grim effort by Crown Point City Court Judge Kent
Jeffirs and Coroner David Pastrick to educate young alcohol and drug
probationers about the fatal consequences they face.

Before that viewing, some in the audience sounded cocky as they
recounted their arrests.

One young woman said she had a blood-alcohol concentration of .14,
well over the legal limit of .08, but insisted to Moore, "No, I
wasn't (drunk), I really wasn't."

Moore shot back, "I was there."

To all of the probationers, he said, "You thought you were all right,
but the field sobriety test showed different."

A young man said he was caught smoking a marijuana pipe while
driving. A girl said her friends got her into trouble buying shots
for her at a bar to celebrate her birthday. Another girl had been
drinking at a friend's house and was arrested going the wrong way
down a one-way street. She had a .14 blood-alcohol concentration.

Moore said a recent study shows that a person with a blood alcohol
level of .15 is 380 times more likely to be in an accident. But, he
told the young people, "You guys think you are invincible."

Deliopoulos showed more pictures of accident victims, including a man
cut in half when he struck the back of a garbage truck as he was racing a car.

He said impaired drivers often have their chests crushed by the
steering wheel, or the force of the impact sends the brain bouncing
around inside the skull.

"The decisions you are making determine whether you end up alive or
here," he told his audience.