Tyson Dever - Distracted Driving Survivor and Motivational Speaker

My name is Tyson Dever. I am a survivor of distracted driving. It was March 11th, 2005. It was the day we got out for spring break. I'm going to school at Texas State University in San Marcus. I'm on a two lane road. I'm in the right hand lane waiting on oncoming traffic so that I can make a left hand turn into the neighborhood where I was going. Behind me is a single cab pickup truck. Like most cars do when they get tired of waiting, he goes around on the
shoulder of the road and gets back in front of me, but that's when a fully loaded cement truck going close to 70 miles per hour hit my car from behind and went completely over the top of it. Then the momentum of that crash knocked me into oncoming traffic, where I was struck again by a Nissan Xterra coming the other way. I actually got hit twice.

This picture here is the fully loaded cement truck. As you can see, there's cement poured out on the road. It's tipped over on its side which goes to show how fast he was going. Once he hit my car, then
he tipped over and skidded down the road a little ways.

Everything that I know, he hurt his back, but he was released from the hospital that night. It wasn't anything serious. We don't know what he was doing, if he was just going too fast, if he was not paying attention, if he was distracted on his cell phone, eating a cheeseburger. Nobody knows what he was doing. Without him telling us, we'll never know, but there's no signs of him slowing down, no skid marks, just a tipped over cement truck.

When the cement truck hit my car from behind and went over, the impact of that crash is what severed my spinal cord at D12, which is right at your belly button. I was already paralyzed at the time. I thought my feet were pinned under what was left of the pedals, but really I'm paralyzed. I'm fighting and trying to go get out of the car. My legs are not just cooperating, because I was already paralyzed at the time.

I didn't understand that I was paralyzed until I woke up in the hospital after surgeries and everything. As soon as they pulled me out of the car, I lost consciousness for the first time. I ended up dying four times that day, so once on the scene, twice in the helicopter, and once on the operating table. It wasn't until I got to the hospital and I was done with surgery and my family got there that my mom came in. I had to ask her, Mom, am I paralyzed? Now of course the doctor had already told me, but you don't want to believe him. You don't know this guy. Mom comes in and I ask her, Mom, am I paralyzed? Unfortunately, I put that weight on her shoulders to tell me, yes, Tyson, you're
paralyzed.

It's probably the thing that's most frustrating about distracted driving is that it's 100% avoidable. If you're not distracted while you're driving, then you're not distracted driving. I think we live in a world now that's so go, go, go and so busy that we need to return this call, this text message, this email, that we don't want to wait. We want to do it right then. Everything is available to us through a cell phone, but it's not just through cell phones. It's playing with the radio. It's talking to your neighborhood. It's eating a cheeseburger, putting your makeup on. All those are distractions. We just have to make sure that we focus on the road in front of us. That's what I do today. I travel the nation sharing my story hoping to make a difference in the lives of others and hopefully encourage people to not be distracted while they're driving.

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