A few minutes later, though, the officers heard someone say over the police radio, "bodies trapped. Bodies trapped."

The officers hopped into their cruiser and sped off to the scene of a horrific collision a short distance away on Beaverdams Road, where the Mazda had been hit head-on by a station wagon driven by a Welland man.

Spink, responding to his first fatal accident, remembers the scene, with the two ruined cars on the darkened road, was quiet.

"It was calm and peaceful," he told a group of Niagara teens Oct. 30 at the Four Points Sheraton hotel in Thorold, part of the 12th annual Impact youth substance abuse prevention conference hosted by the Niagara Drug Awareness Committee.

Spink said the damage to the station wagon -- and to the man -- was absolute. A lifeless arm hung outside of the mangled wreckage.

"The car basically consumed him," he said of the man, who tests revealed was drunk.

In the other car, designated driver Lucas Hodgson suffered horrific injuries: his diaphram punctured by metal, a crushed arm, finger tendons ripped off and left hanging by his elbow, a shattered back, smashed knee, his jaw broken in three places and half his teeth knocked out, his foot smashed backwards and left up around his calf.

Two of Hodgson's friends were also injured, and his friend Jason Pearson -- a player on the Brock men's basketball team -- was curled up in the footrest area of the back seat, dead.

Hodgson stopped breathing at least twice as he was rushed to hospital, and his dad was pulled over by an OPP officer to tell him to get to a Hamilton hospital because his son wasn't going to make it.

Spink and Hodgson told the students about the accident from each other's perspective, to drive home to the students the dangers of drinking and driving.

Likewise, Nicole Rusling with the region's public health department discussed the dangers of speeding and being distracted while driving, and explained motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among Canadian youth.

Shelby Young, a Grade 12 student at Kernahan Park Secondary School in St. Catharines, knows about the dangers of driver error: her best friend, an 18-year-old Beamsville teen, was killed in July 2007 when he tried to pass another car in a no-pass area on a Hamilton Road. Alcohol was not a factor.

"He was going to teach me how to drive," she said.

Hodgson urged the teens that if they do drink -- even if they're under age -- to either call a cab or call their parents to get picked up, rather than risk getting behind the wheel or into a car in which someone else who's consumed alcohol is driving.

"They might be mad," he said. "But I'd rather have my parents mad for a couple of weeks than not see them again."