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With the holidays upon us I wanted to share a message about distracted driving. Here is some information we recently shared on our Department of Public Safety blog.

“It was supposed to be a routine trip for 20-year-old Megan Severson. On Oct. 17, 2019, Severson was driving from Preston in southeastern Minnesota to visit her boyfriend in North Dakota. But when she reached Highway 52 in St. Paul, everything changed in an instant.

The crash:– Severson glanced over at her GPS to see which exit she needed to take. “I looked down and I was speeding, so it felt a lot shorter than it actually was,” said Severson. “When I came to realize that the cars in front of me were stopped, I hit my brakes as fast as I thought I could.”

She couldn’t stop in time. Severson walked away from the crash with her life. An innocent passenger did not. Severson rear-ended the stopped car in front of her, causing a chain-reaction crash involving multiple vehicles. A passenger in the car she hit, Anthony Kawino, 33, of Burnsville was killed. “I just looked around at the scene that was in front of me,” Severson recalled. “It was horrific. I saw them pulling the blanket over the deceased, and at that point it clicked into my brain that this is bad. Very, very bad.”

Minnesota State Patrol Sgt. Daniel Dixon was the reconstructionist who documented how and why this crash happened. The answers were obvious, he said. Severson was speeding at 70 mph in a 55 mph zone just before she hit the car Kawino was in. “At that speed, if you’re looking at your GPS for five seconds to try to figure out where you would need to go next, you just traveled almost two football fields of distance,” Dixon said.

Somber anniversary: Severson was charged with criminal vehicular homicide because she was speeding and distracted at the time of the crash. She still remembers her lawyer explaining what this felony charge could mean for her future. “When he first said people normally get prison time, I went off the rails in my mind,” Severson added. “I didn’t know what to think. I was in a big state of panic. I mean, nobody wants to go to prison.”

Severson pleaded guilty to the charge. She was sentenced to around three months in jail and five years of probation. The judge also granted a request from Kawino’s family; having Severson report to jail on Oct. 17 each year — the anniversary of the deadly crash.

“It’s probably the worst day of the year for me,” Severson said. “Everything just cycles back as if it happened yesterday. All of it. The crash, Anthony, his family. What would he be doing? Would he have a family of his own? Married? Kids?”

Lessons learned: Severson hopes sharing her story will encourage other drivers to put distractions away when they are behind the wheel. “Don’t do it, because there are heavy consequences and it’s more than prison, jail or probation. It’s your whole life. It’s the guilt, the pain,” Severson said. “We have to realize it’s not just us on the road. It takes just one wrong, slight move to end your life or another person’s life – and it happens fast.”

Across Minnesota, distracted driving was a factor in one in 11 crashes from 2019 to 2023. Distracted driving contributed to an average of 29 deaths and 146 life-changing injuries a year over that same time period. So far in 2024, distractions have been a factor in 27 (comes on Tuesday current as of Dec. 17) traffic deaths.

It’s frustrating for Dixon knowing something preventable is causing deaths on Minnesota roads. “It seems like as the cars get better, safer and smarter that drivers get more relaxed and less attentive to what’s going on out there,” he said. “It’s evident that the message is not getting across because people are still playing on their phones while driving all the time, as much as you try to explain that this is dangerous.”

As Severson works to move on from that tragic crash five years ago, she says she is taking this second chance at life seriously – knowing Kawino wasn’t as fortunate. “I’m not living for just myself. I’m living for two. The life that I took. It makes me want to push to be the best I can be.’”