Two deaths, 1 close call stir fears of teen parties
Keith O'Brien, Boston Globe
2/22/2009
On New Year's Eve, with winds howling, snow swirling, and temperatures hovering near zero, a 16-year-old high school student, drunk on rum, left an unsupervised party at a friend's house, wandered out into the night, and went missing in Marblehead.
Friends initially lied about the events that preceded Ben Barber's disappearance, according to the police report, and Barber himself later admitted that he hid from searchers' lights, not wanting to get in trouble. Those decisions - along with the excessive drinking - nearly killed him. When firefighters finally found the teenager near a snowdrift behind a house more than six hours after his friends last saw him, Barber was missing a shoe and a sock, and was unre sponsive. He was suffering from frostbite and severe hypothermia, and his core temperature had fallen to 88 degrees.
But Barber was alive.
"How he survived that, I have no idea," said the boy's father, Dave Barber, who did not know that night his son was drinking. "I can't stop saying how lucky we are that he's here."
The recent deaths of two Massachusetts teenagers - 17-year-old Taylor Meyer last October in Norfolk and 16-year-old Elizabeth Mun last weekend in Andover, who each wandered away from unsupervised parties and died in cold, shallow bodies of water - have shocked parents and teenagers alike. But Ben Barber's story, hauntingly similar to the two girls' deaths in many ways, reveals an unsettling truth: that these episodes, while rare, are perhaps not as unlikely as parents and children would like to believe, especially when teenagers are left to supervise other teenagers.
Between 2001 and 2005, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 125 people, age 16 to 20, drowned annually in cases involving alcohol. An estimated 37 young people died per year in alcohol-related falls, according to the data, and another 41 died per year in fires.
Those are small figures, at least in comparison with the number of young drivers who drank, got behind the wheel and died in car crashes in 2007 - nearly 1,000, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That's why most parents tell their children not to drink and drive - a simple message, easily delivered, on a serious issue. But as recent events in Massachusetts have shown, the messages parents need to be delivering are a lot more complicated than that.
"Parents may feel safe with their children being in the safety of their own home or someone else's home - and not on the road," said Toben Nelson, assistant director of the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, which examines the impact of drinking on young people. "But I think that's a false sense of security. When someone's intoxicated, particularly someone underage, they're very vulnerable to a range of bad consequences."
It's not known if Mun, whose funeral was held yesterday, or her friends were drinking alcohol prior to her death. Investigators aren't saying. But Essex County authorities have confirmed that there were no parents home the night of the party when Mun wandered off, just as there were no parents around last fall when Meyer, celebrating homecoming, attended a drinking party in a wooded section of Norfolk. The two episodes, taken together, offer a window into the teenage party culture, where parents are often oblivious, or gone for the night, binge drinking is prevalent, and tragedies like these are all too likely, unfolding many times right in someone's living room or basement.
"I often encourage parents not to allow kids to have sleepovers," said Jim McCauley, director of youth and family services at Riverside Community Care, a Needham-based nonprofit that provides substance abuse counseling among other services. "Teenagers don't need to have sleepovers. Sleepover is just another way of saying they're going to go someplace and drink."
Even though Massachusetts' rates of underage drinking have fallen in recent years, the state still has one of the highest rates of underage binge drinking in the country, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
In 2006, more than 11 percent of Massachusetts youths ages 12 to 17 reported binge drinking - defined as consuming five or more drinks in one sitting - during the prior month, according to the survey. For drinkers age 12 to 20, the rate was more than double: 23 percent. And the number of high school students reporting any drinking in the previous month, according to 2007 state data, is even higher: 46 percent.
Inevitably, said Steve Wing, SAMHSA's associate administrator for alcohol policy, such behavior is going to lead to tragedies. Teenagers who have been drinking will die in car accidents, he said, in drownings, and in alcohol-fueled violence.
"And from time to time," Wing said, "one of them will have too much alcohol on board, wander off and die of alcohol poisoning. It is a rare event on the spectrum," he added, noting that there are no numbers tracking these deaths.
Well aware of that now, given the recent incidents, parents scrambled last week to remind their children of the dangers of underage drinking. In Wellesley, Janet Forte sat down with her 13-year-old daughter, Anna, to talk about the recent deaths. In Andover, not far from where Mun died, Andrea Zaimes had a similar discussion with her 15-year-old son. And in Needham, Susan Ishige, who's strict with her two teenaged boys and proud of it, said the deaths reminded her why she doesn't allow her boys to be at houses when parents are not home.
"They're good kids," she said. "But good kids make mistakes."
It is a lesson that Leslie Walker said she learned recently with her 14-year-old son in Belmont when he went over to a friend's house on New Year's Eve. "The father was there. Adults were there. Everyone knew about it. They got dropped off by parents. Everything you're supposed to do with a 14-year-old," Walker said. And still, there were problems, she said, when one friend, who had been drinking beforehand, began to vomit in the basement and the children did not tell the parents upstairs about it.
"There are dozens of these incidents in every town that don't make it to the level of a death," Walker said. But they're scary nonetheless. "This kid is vomiting, passed out. They take his vomit-laden clothes off. But they don't tell anybody."
On the same night, up in Marblehead, Ben Barber's friends used similar tactics to keep parents from knowing the truth, according to the police report documenting the search for the 16-year-old. After Barber's parents called police around 3 a.m., concerned about his whereabouts, the youngsters initially told officers "several versions of the night's events," attempting to conceal the party they had held while Barber's friend's parents were having dinner at an Italian restaurant.
The lies impeded the search, police said, forcing them to chase down false leads in the middle of the cold, blustery night, where winds in town reached gusts of 52 miles per hour. But ultimately, with the help of thermal imaging devices, firefighters found Barber in the snow. "It was a close call. No question about it," said his father, Dave Barber. And for the Barber family, the ordeal still isn't over. Last week, Dave Barber said, doctors were forced to amputate half of his son's big toe due to frostbite damage. It was traumatic for his son, Barber said. "For any kid," he said, "it would be upsetting." But Dave Barber knows that it could have been so much worse.
"Our hearts go out to the parents who weren't so lucky," he said. "You just wish that kids will learn from these things, and maybe they will."
Keith O'Brien, Boston Globe
2/22/2009
On New Year's Eve, with winds howling, snow swirling, and temperatures hovering near zero, a 16-year-old high school student, drunk on rum, left an unsupervised party at a friend's house, wandered out into the night, and went missing in Marblehead.
Friends initially lied about the events that preceded Ben Barber's disappearance, according to the police report, and Barber himself later admitted that he hid from searchers' lights, not wanting to get in trouble. Those decisions - along with the excessive drinking - nearly killed him. When firefighters finally found the teenager near a snowdrift behind a house more than six hours after his friends last saw him, Barber was missing a shoe and a sock, and was unre sponsive. He was suffering from frostbite and severe hypothermia, and his core temperature had fallen to 88 degrees.
But Barber was alive.
"How he survived that, I have no idea," said the boy's father, Dave Barber, who did not know that night his son was drinking. "I can't stop saying how lucky we are that he's here."
The recent deaths of two Massachusetts teenagers - 17-year-old Taylor Meyer last October in Norfolk and 16-year-old Elizabeth Mun last weekend in Andover, who each wandered away from unsupervised parties and died in cold, shallow bodies of water - have shocked parents and teenagers alike. But Ben Barber's story, hauntingly similar to the two girls' deaths in many ways, reveals an unsettling truth: that these episodes, while rare, are perhaps not as unlikely as parents and children would like to believe, especially when teenagers are left to supervise other teenagers.
Between 2001 and 2005, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 125 people, age 16 to 20, drowned annually in cases involving alcohol. An estimated 37 young people died per year in alcohol-related falls, according to the data, and another 41 died per year in fires.
Those are small figures, at least in comparison with the number of young drivers who drank, got behind the wheel and died in car crashes in 2007 - nearly 1,000, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That's why most parents tell their children not to drink and drive - a simple message, easily delivered, on a serious issue. But as recent events in Massachusetts have shown, the messages parents need to be delivering are a lot more complicated than that.
"Parents may feel safe with their children being in the safety of their own home or someone else's home - and not on the road," said Toben Nelson, assistant director of the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, which examines the impact of drinking on young people. "But I think that's a false sense of security. When someone's intoxicated, particularly someone underage, they're very vulnerable to a range of bad consequences."
It's not known if Mun, whose funeral was held yesterday, or her friends were drinking alcohol prior to her death. Investigators aren't saying. But Essex County authorities have confirmed that there were no parents home the night of the party when Mun wandered off, just as there were no parents around last fall when Meyer, celebrating homecoming, attended a drinking party in a wooded section of Norfolk. The two episodes, taken together, offer a window into the teenage party culture, where parents are often oblivious, or gone for the night, binge drinking is prevalent, and tragedies like these are all too likely, unfolding many times right in someone's living room or basement.
"I often encourage parents not to allow kids to have sleepovers," said Jim McCauley, director of youth and family services at Riverside Community Care, a Needham-based nonprofit that provides substance abuse counseling among other services. "Teenagers don't need to have sleepovers. Sleepover is just another way of saying they're going to go someplace and drink."
Even though Massachusetts' rates of underage drinking have fallen in recent years, the state still has one of the highest rates of underage binge drinking in the country, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
In 2006, more than 11 percent of Massachusetts youths ages 12 to 17 reported binge drinking - defined as consuming five or more drinks in one sitting - during the prior month, according to the survey. For drinkers age 12 to 20, the rate was more than double: 23 percent. And the number of high school students reporting any drinking in the previous month, according to 2007 state data, is even higher: 46 percent.
Inevitably, said Steve Wing, SAMHSA's associate administrator for alcohol policy, such behavior is going to lead to tragedies. Teenagers who have been drinking will die in car accidents, he said, in drownings, and in alcohol-fueled violence.
"And from time to time," Wing said, "one of them will have too much alcohol on board, wander off and die of alcohol poisoning. It is a rare event on the spectrum," he added, noting that there are no numbers tracking these deaths.
Well aware of that now, given the recent incidents, parents scrambled last week to remind their children of the dangers of underage drinking. In Wellesley, Janet Forte sat down with her 13-year-old daughter, Anna, to talk about the recent deaths. In Andover, not far from where Mun died, Andrea Zaimes had a similar discussion with her 15-year-old son. And in Needham, Susan Ishige, who's strict with her two teenaged boys and proud of it, said the deaths reminded her why she doesn't allow her boys to be at houses when parents are not home.
"They're good kids," she said. "But good kids make mistakes."
It is a lesson that Leslie Walker said she learned recently with her 14-year-old son in Belmont when he went over to a friend's house on New Year's Eve. "The father was there. Adults were there. Everyone knew about it. They got dropped off by parents. Everything you're supposed to do with a 14-year-old," Walker said. And still, there were problems, she said, when one friend, who had been drinking beforehand, began to vomit in the basement and the children did not tell the parents upstairs about it.
"There are dozens of these incidents in every town that don't make it to the level of a death," Walker said. But they're scary nonetheless. "This kid is vomiting, passed out. They take his vomit-laden clothes off. But they don't tell anybody."
On the same night, up in Marblehead, Ben Barber's friends used similar tactics to keep parents from knowing the truth, according to the police report documenting the search for the 16-year-old. After Barber's parents called police around 3 a.m., concerned about his whereabouts, the youngsters initially told officers "several versions of the night's events," attempting to conceal the party they had held while Barber's friend's parents were having dinner at an Italian restaurant.
The lies impeded the search, police said, forcing them to chase down false leads in the middle of the cold, blustery night, where winds in town reached gusts of 52 miles per hour. But ultimately, with the help of thermal imaging devices, firefighters found Barber in the snow. "It was a close call. No question about it," said his father, Dave Barber. And for the Barber family, the ordeal still isn't over. Last week, Dave Barber said, doctors were forced to amputate half of his son's big toe due to frostbite damage. It was traumatic for his son, Barber said. "For any kid," he said, "it would be upsetting." But Dave Barber knows that it could have been so much worse.
"Our hearts go out to the parents who weren't so lucky," he said. "You just wish that kids will learn from these things, and maybe they will."
