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.”