Grief Made Tustin Woman an Activist

Years ago, when she was a homemaker, Helen Shanbrom involved herself with a group of other mothers in a school fracas over “what our children should and could read.”

They fought the PTA and the school board, and they won.

That was as political as Shanbrom ever got until four years ago when a gravel truck that the California Highway Patrol said was going 65 m.p.h. crossed the Foothill Freeway center divider in San Dimas and killed her son, David, 27, a 1980 graduate of UCLA.

Today, in retrospect, the North Tustin woman contends, “If you feel strongly about something, stand up and speak out. I never used that philosophy until David was killed.”

So, using that thinking, Shanbrom started a crusade to promote new legislation to protect others against truck drivers who break the law.

“Why am I doing this? To keep David’s memory alive, so no one will forget how he died,” and he will not be “just another statistic,” she says. “He was a valuable human being.”

“Grief can change you completely,” says Shanbrom, who has three other children from her 43-year marriage to retired physician Ed Shanbrom. “It just activated me. I felt I had to do something.”

Friends told her to forget trying, that she was only one person.

“I didn’t know if I could do anything, but I felt I just had to try,” she says.

So for four years she turned into another person, barraging politicians with letters urging that laws be changed to protect innocent drivers.

“My goal is to turn on the news and not hear every day of another, and another, and another tractor-trailer jackknifed or overturned or burning or spilling on the freeways,” she says.

“Since speed is consistently the major cause of truck-involved accidents where truck drivers are at fault, I say ‘Slow down!’

“I became a one-woman lobbyist. I learned how to work through the involved and complicated political system.”

Shanbrom admits, however, “I still don’t understand it completely, but I know more than most.”

State Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim) helped her by using his influence to pass bills raising the penalty for speeding truck drivers; increasing the number of spot roadside safety inspections of trucks; and launching a pilot program of using unmarked CHP cars for truck safety enforcement.

Commercial truck drivers were also banned from using only hand or service brakes to stop their vehicles, the type of brakes used by the truck that plowed into her son’s car.

Part of her effort, Shanbrom adds, is to inspire others to stand up and speak up.

“Except for my husband and my other children, I gave up a lot of things to tighten truck safety,” she says, noting that she works daily in her home to right what she considers a deadly wrong on the freeways.

Others harmed in truck-related traffic accidents have written to congratulate her.

“I like to think I have helped, but I look at the statistics and see increases in traffic deaths,” she says.

Shanbrom acknowledges that the statistics might have been even higher without her efforts. But while she feels “somewhat successful,” she says, she is “not successful enough.”

One of her hurts is knowing that “we live in a society that will get you off even if you break the law, because everyone has rights.”

But she notes that “David has no rights left. I have to speak for him.”