Oswego crash: February 2008 Archives

BY MIKE CETERA

At the conclusion of last week's live virtual town hall meeting on underage drinking, we promised that the experts who participated in the forum would reply to the unanswered questions.

Angela Halvorson of TopLine Professional Strategies, which is a consultant to the Illinois Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Association, has authored a response. Please find her answers after the jump.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the chat. We believe it was a successful jumpstart to what should be an ongoing conversation about alcohol use among teens.

Mourners gather around the site of the crash that killed five Oswego teenagers on Route 31 in Oswego last year.

BY DAVE PARRO AND MIKE CETERA

What has changed in the year since the Oswego crash? Has the community found any new effective solutions to the problem of teen drinking? Where do we go from here?

Join us at 8 p.m. tonight if you have answers to any of those questions or have questions of your own. In an effort to start a new conversation about teen drinking on the one-year anniversary of the Oswego crash, we'll be hosting a virtual town-hall meeting to get the discussion started.

A number of experts from across the state will participate, but this online session will really be about the community. We want to hear from you about the events of a year ago, what has (or hasn't) changed and where the solutions might lie.

Peter Hoffman/Beacon News
(From left) Oswego students Megan Findlay, 16; Tasha Tretternero, 17; Alex Peterson, 17; and Alyssa Plac, 17, gather at the site where five of their classmates were killed Feb. 11, 2007. Monday marks the one-year anniversary of the accident that also injured four teens.

BY DAVE PARRO

In the year since the Oswego crash claimed five young lives, there's been a lot of talk about how to combat the problem of teen drinking. But has anything really changed in the wake of the tragedy?

Kids are still dying in drunken-driving crashes. Parents are still being arrested for hosting "supervised" drinking parties. And our communities continue to be scarred by the consequences.

So has the window of opportunity for change after the Oswego crash already closed?