DEERFIELD, Wis. — The car was racing down a country road at speeds well over 100 mph, even though the cop who'd been chasing it had given up. So when the young passengers saw the "T" in the road ahead, they knew there was no way driver Matt Hotmann could stop or make the turn.
Passenger Kyle Smith uttered a swear word. In the back seat, Mary Reinhart squeezed her friend Jeremy Budahn's hand and told him she loved him. "I love you, too, sweetie," he said.
Then Reinhart — knowing that a night of partying with a few friends was about to take a tragic turn — made a last-minute decision that probably saved her life: "I clicked my seat belt and covered my face." She heard the sound of cracking plastic and shattering glass as the car rolled several times into a frozen farm field.
Budahn and Hotmann, who was her boyfriend, died instantly and Smith a few hours later in the hospital. All three were not wearing seat belts and suffered extensive head injuries when they were thrown from the car. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Reinhart walked away from the December accident with bruises on her hands, a few scratches and a black eye.
Motor vehicle crashes remain the nation's leading cause of death for 15- to 20-year-olds and, in many cases, experts say, seat belts could have made a difference.
Of the 5,341 teens killed in crashes in 2001, two-thirds were not wearing seat belts, according to the most recent statistics available from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, also known as NHTSA.
"It's such a waste," Reinhart says as she sits in her family's home a few miles east of Madison, clutching a small urn that holds some of Hotmann's ashes. "So many people could be saved."
With the help of tougher seat belt laws and young accident survivors such as Reinhart, that message appears to be getting through to some.
Overall, about three-quarters of Americans say they wear seat belts, according to NHTSA surveys. Among those ages 16 to 24, 69 percent say they wear their seat belts — an improvement over years past.
But experts say those numbers are still not good enough. And some wonder how many young people, even if they say they're wearing seat belts, are doing so regularly.
A classroom survey released earlier this year by car maker Volkswagen found that about a third of high school students deemed seat belt use "uncool."
Another 30 percent said belts were uncomfortable or would wrinkle their clothing, while 20 percent said they thought seat belts were unnecessary on short trips. And 18 percent said a feeling of invincibility — "nothing will happen to me" — stopped them from regularly buckling up. The survey had a margin of error of 5 percentage points.
California was among the first states to impose tougher laws like the ones Wisconsin is considering. Now seat belt use there is in the 90 percent range, among the best in the country.
But in Idaho, 18-year-old Caloub Huttash thinks the seat belt fine — recently upped from $5 to $10 — is still laughable. "That's not going to do it," says Huttash, an accident survivor himself.
He wasn't wearing a seat belt when he crashed two years ago while speeding home to meet a midnight curfew. He was thrown from the car, broke his back in two places and had to have surgery to repair his left ear, which was nearly torn off.
"Most physicians would tell you I'm a walking miracle," says Huttash, who is now lobbying for tougher laws in his state.