SANTA ANA : Group Works for Pickup Truck Safety

Riding in the bed of a pickup truck used to be something Ben Mendoza did as naturally as breathing.

“I thought nothing of it,” said Mendoza, 16, a sophomore at Century High School, “until the day a friend of mine was thrown out of a pickup truck and got killed.”

It happened when he was in elementary school, he said. One of his friends had been riding in the back of a relative’s pickup truck when it crashed into another vehicle, ejecting the 8-year-old boy.

“That’s when I realized how easy it is to get killed from the back of a pickup truck,” he said.

Mendoza was among about 50 students gathered in the auditorium of Century High School on Friday to help kick off the California Pickup Truck Safety Campaign. The campaign is part of a $300,000 project funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety to educate people about the dangers of riding in the cargo area of pickup trucks.

The three-year project is coordinated by Dr. Phyllis Agran, director of UC Irvine’s Pediatric Injury Prevention Research Group. She also helped to bring national attention to the need for seat belts in the late 1970s.

As a result of the group’s efforts, California was among the first states in the nation to pass a law in 1993 that makes it illegal for passengers to ride in the back of a pickup truck. But the problem has persisted, Agran said. Last year, 38 people died in California while traveling in the bed of a pickup truck; some 11,000 people were ticketed for the same reason, according to California Highway Patrol statistics. The majority of those killed were age 21 or younger, according to CHP.

Agran said: “That’s why we wanted to target high school students.”