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The not-so-cool side of spring

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By Barb Ickes | Saturday, April 05, 2008 | 13 comment(s)

The lesson’s the same. Brandi and Heidi Rubel insist that police and the local newspaper got it wrong when they reported that 18-year-old Brandi was talking on her cell phone when she slammed into the back of a farmer and his tractor on

U.S. 61 in Clinton County about six weeks ago.

It was a serious wreck that easily could have killed someone.

No matter how you slice it, Rubel was at fault. Most any time you hit someone from behind you’re going to get the ticket for failing to stop at a safe distance. You’re supposed to have control of your vehicle.

At the same time, it could be argued that few of us would expect to find a slow-moving tractor on a snowy highway in February. But there it was.

The wreck “shook Brandi to her very being,” her mother said. It couldn’t have done much for Sagers, either.

But people’s eagerness to blame a teenager and her cell phone are misplaced this time, she said.

“We’ve drilled into our kids’ heads not to talk on the cell phone while they’re driving,” Heidi Rubel said. “She was only two miles from the turn-off to our house, and she thought it might be me calling.

“I’d been at the emergency room with another of our children the night before, and she didn’t want to miss a call from me. She picked up the phone without looking away and held it in her line of sight. The only time she looked away was for the second it took to set the phone back down.”

We’ve all done it. Maybe some of us have managed to get through the past decade without ever having a phone in the car, but there are plenty of other distractions.

Haven’t we glanced at the clock on the radio? Don’t we look in the rearview mirror a couple dozen times, every time we drive?

There’s no reason to make excuses for Brandi. She knows she made a mistake, even if she said it wasn’t the mistake that went with the Maquoketa Sentinel-Press headline, “Cell phone use causes accident.”

The Iowa State Patrol sent out a news release about a week ago, reminding us that the planting season is upon us (or nearly upon us) and that accidents involving farm machinery are five times more likely to result in a fatality than other accidents.

With warmer weather we’ll soon have kids on bikes all over the place, too, so it’s a good idea to keep our winter-driving cautions on hand for the next bunch of dangers that cross our paths.

“Brandi feels horrible about what happened,” Rubel said. “It felt like it knocked 50 years off my life.”

Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com.