Sara Paulson just earned her learner's driving permit and she intended to be the world's safest driver.
"She kept saying she was going to be the best driver of the four of us," mother Mary Jo Paulson says of her 15-year-old daughter, who planned to be either a dog trainer or a travel agent when she grew up.Sara, of Belgrade, Minn., never got the chance to practice her defensive driving skills.
She died Aug. 4 in a head-on automobile accident near 4700 S. Highland Drive. Her sister, brother-in-law and nephew, of Pocatello, Idaho, were also seriously injured in the Salt Lake accident that claimed Sara's life.
"Sara was a real person, not a stat," says older brother Marc Paulson, 17. "She was a real person and she was killed."This isn't something that goes away. I'm going to live with this for the rest of my life. I feel like I have something to make up to my sister."
Mary Jo Paulson and her husband, Bruce, are mourning the loss of their tall, pretty, dark-haired, freckle-faced daughter. Sara Dawn was a budding young actress, a champion dog trainer who was active in the North Fork Livewires 4-H Club.
Arthur Bruce Macduff, 26, of Salt Lake City, has been charged in 3rd Circuit Court with one count of vehicular homicide, three counts of driving under the influence of alcohol and causing an injury accident, one count of driving on revocation or suspension and one count of operating a vehicle without insurance. Witnesses said Macduff drove across several lanes of oncoming traffic before colliding with the vehicle Sara was riding in.
"If I had my way, I'd build the Taj Mahal in her memory," Mary Jo Paulson said in a phone interview Friday from her rural, central Minnesota home.
She attended her first Mothers Against Drunk Driving meeting Tuesday, and she intends to work to help change a deficient legal system, one that allows drunken drivers back onto America's highways.
Some 62 people are killed every day in the United States by drunken drivers. Paulson urges other parents to get involved in the fight to make the country's highways safer before a senseless tragedy forces them to.
"I want Sara's death to have an impact on people because if it doesn't bring about change . . . I just want to think about every positive way to bring about some good out of this terrible tragedy."
Mrs. Paulson doesn't want other parents to have to live through their worst nightmare, which her family suffered earlier this month. That's when they received the news of their daughter's death in an early morning phone call. Mrs. Paulson said her husband cried for two days after the accident. It will be two more months before her other daughter, Sheri Hartman, is healed enough from injuries suffered in the same accident to hold her 2-year-old son.
"Every time my son goes out the door, I live in fear. After you lose somebody, it becomes very real.
"Every time I see a good book that she won't be able to read, I'm going to be just heartbroken."
Marc Paulson joined a youth group that aims to help teenagers with substance abuse problems earlier this spring. But the reality of his younger sister's death has sent him on the warpath.
"I'm not going to go out and tell people my own age not to drink. But you don't have to drink and drive," Marc says.
"She was a typical teenager, you know," Sara's mother says. "I'm not trying to portray her as a perfect kid, but she was one who was treasured and loved by many people. She was a person that just loved life and looked forward to every moment of it."