Of grave concern: Funeral home ads take aim at texting and driving

A funeral home company is using a billboard campaign to try and keep people from needing their services.

The ads implore passers-by to not get themselves or somebody else killed in a distracted driving crash, specifically while texting and driving.

“PLZ DNT TXT N DRV: We Can Wait,” read the billboards, which are put up by several mortuaries owned by Lucas Funeral Homes.

And it’s not just billboards. Dark humor and graphic videos are being used in ads to get the attention of drivers who might be tempted to answer their cellphones’ beeps and tones. Government agencies, big businesses and even a few small operations — including an Arlington video production company — are creating shocking public service announcements to drive home the warnings. Many of the advertisements feature re-creations, or sometimes actual images, of fatal wrecks.

Experts say distracted driving — especially the use of cellphones or other mobile devices for texting or social media — is emerging as perhaps the No. 1 problem on America’s roads. The federal government’s top highway safety official now says it’s the main culprit behind a nearly 10 percent spike in road deaths nationwide since last year.

The issue is a constant topic of discussion in Texas, which is one of four states that don’t have a blanket ban on texting while driving — although many Texas cities have local ordinances prohibiting the practice, and there is a state law against texting in school zones.

During the 2011 legislative session, Texas lawmakers actually passed a ban on texting while driving, but then-Gov. Rick Perry called it “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults” and vetoed it. Efforts to get legislation passed during the 2013 session also failed.

Of the 3,534 deaths in traffic crashes in Texas in 2014, 483 — or 14 percent — involved a distracted driver. In comparison, there were 1,041 people killed (29 percent) in crashes where a driver was under the influence of alcohol.

In Fort Worth, distracted driving was a factor in 14 of the 85 fatalities (16.5 percent) in 2015, police said.

‘Please don’t do it’

As the distracted driving fatalities continue to rise, frustration about drivers’ reckless behavior with their mobile devices is motivating safety advocates to push the envelope in their ads.

“It’s humor in a way. You could say dark humor. But we don’t want to be disrespectful either. So we have to walk that fine line,” said Mark Lucas-Kelly, an executive at Lucas Funeral Homes’ Hurst location.

Lucas Funeral Homes has put up six billboards, including one on eastbound West Vickery Boulevard in Fort Worth and another on southbound U.S. 287 toward Mansfield. Two other billboards on Texas 121 in the Haltom City area were recently damaged by wind but will soon be replaced, he said.

Some of the billboards tout Lucas Funeral Homes by name, while others identify with subsidiaries such as Robertson Mueller Harper.

“We see families when they’re going through the toughest times of their life,” Lucas-Kelly said. “You could call us the ‘last responders,’ in a way. But even though it’s somewhat humorous and catchy, we’re 100 percent sincere about the message. Please don’t do it.”

‘What really matters most’

Some of the approaches aren’t as harsh.

AT&T is running a commercial featuring Dallas native and pro golfer Jordan Spieth, who finished tied for second in last weekend’s Master’s tournament in Augusta, Ga., urging fans not to text and drive. Spieth is shown calling his parents, then placing the phone in his car’s glove box and driving off. “I use it to remind me of what really matters most,” Spieth says in the commercial. “That’s why sometimes I don’t use it at all.”

But another AT&T ad, this one featuring North Richland Hills police and paramedics, shows a woman crashing into another car while texting and driving. The phone’s camera shows an up-close view of a police officer putting the device into an evidence bag and walking over to an ambulance.

Volkswagen took a shocking approach in releasing a commercial that features patrons in a Hong Kong movie theater. In the ad, viewers are watching video of a car driving down a country road on the big screen while waiting for their film to begin when all their cellphones simultaneously beep or vibrate — and when the viewers look down at their phones, the car in the commercial slams into a tree.

The lesson is how quickly a crash can happen by taking your eyes off the road for just a couple of seconds.

Real-life stories of distracted driving crashes are also common. Just this week, a story of a California teen who survived her first texting-and-driving crash but died in the second, has hooked readers through social media.

‘Look what you did?’

In Arlington, Tyler Case, who owns a video company named Four Horsemen Productions, created a public service announcement loosely based on a horrific crash in May 2014.

The PSA, which is about four minutes long, is titled Open Your Eyes. In it, a man is walking near AT&T Stadium with his toddler daughter in a stroller. They cross a street and are struck by a driver using a cellphone. The man is injured, but when he realizes his daughter has been killed he picks up her body and walks over to the driver, yelling tearfully: “Look what you did!”

That PSA was inspired by the May 29, 2014 death of infant David Bingenheimer, who was being pushed in a stroller along a South Cooper Street sidewalk in Arlington when a pickup struck him and his father, Daniel Bingenheimer. The pickup had been hit by a sedan, whose driver — a woman in her early 40s — later received a citation for failure to yield right of way.

Witnesses said that moments after the deadly crash Daniel Bingheimer picked up his son’s body and walked over to the sedan driver, yelling, “Look at what you have done!”

Case said that, although he was inspired by the young Bingenheimer’s death, he changed several details in his PSA because the real-life case was still under investigation. For example, unlike the real-life crash, the victim in the PSA is a little girl, and the driver of the car is a teen-ager who can be clearly seen using a mobile phone.

Weeks after the tragedy, members of the Bingenheimer family told the Star-Telegram they were dismayed to learn that criminal charges would not be filed in the case. But the Tarrant County district attorney’s office said an Arlington police investigation concluded alcohol and texting were not factors in the crash, and the vehicle did not run a red light.

The Bingenheimer family was consulted in the making of the PSA, Case said.

Case said that although only about 12,000 viewers had watched the PSA on YouTube, he hopes it makes a difference in encouraging drivers to watch out for pedestrians.

“I’ve had students from different states email me and say they had an entire class in tears after watching it,” said Case, who raised about $3,000 to pay for the production costs on the crowd-sourcing website Indiegogo. “I got emails from a sheriff in another state who wanted to show it in his distracted driving class.”

‘Use the shock of it’

Katrina Bond, 22, was killed killed Sept. 7, 2011 on Interstate 35W when a man driving a heavy-duty pickup plowed into her car in a work zone. The pickup driver, a Godley resident, told police that he had received a text message two seconds before the collision. He wasn’t charged.

Katrina’s mother, Kathy Bond of far north Fort Worth, supports the use of shocking imagery to get across the message of distracted driving dangers.

“We can’t get people to give it up any other way,” Kathy Bond said. “You have to try every way you can think of. You have to use the shock of it.”

In 2014, the Star-Telegram observed traffic at four intersections to get a sample of drivers’ behaviors, and found that at any given moment 7.4 percent of motorists — behind the wheel of one in every 12 cars on the road — were using a mobile device while their car was moving.

Even though the Lone Star State doesn’t have a ban, Texas Department of Transportation officials have launched a high-profile campaign called “Talk. Text. Crash.” And the topic is gaining traction this month because April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

Bond speaks regularly with high school and college-age drivers, and she believes most of them understand the dangers of texting while driving. But, like the population as a whole, there is a fraction of drivers who don’t think about the consequences, she said.

Bond said she was surprised when, during a recent television interview, a reporter at a Dallas station confided that he understood why drivers were tempted to use mobile devices because when he drove he was often “bored.”

“His angle was how boring driving is,” she said. “I said, ‘You’re bored?’ I’m not bored. When I drive, I’m trying to operate this heavy vehicle and stay safe.”

“There’s a whole segment of people who are getting better about understanding the dangers,” she added. “But there’s a whole other segment of people who are not.”

This report includes material from the Star-Telegram archives.

This story was originally published April 12, 2016 at 2:49 PM with the headline "Of grave concern: Funeral home ads take aim at texting and driving."