Sobering Stories : Recovery: Disabled victims of traumatic accidents seek to warn others about reckless driving and the dangers of youthful hubris.

James Marshall can never remember the nightmare that jars him from his sleep and leaves him coated in sweat. Doctors tell him the dream is probably another visit to that desolate spot on the Antelope Valley Freeway near Red Rock Canyon, the place where Marshall’s body was battered by a horrific collision of metal and glass against asphalt.

“They told me that all my mind can remember is the pain, not the events,” said Marshall, whose body bears long, gruesome scars from his 1989 accident. The hole in his skull is now covered by a metal plate, new skin and hair, but his brain will never fully heal. He can’t hold a job and needs medication to control his emotions.

“Basically, my future is shot,” the husky 26-year-old said. “Any kid who gets into a car and does stupid things should look at me. They could be me. And it’s not a pretty sight.”

For Marshall and other survivors of traumatic accidents in their youth, each new headline about another generation repeating the same mistakes stirs up feelings of frustration and regret. Many of these survivors want to reach out and share their stories, in the hope that young people will believe that it can happen to them.

It is a message that seems especially crucial this summer, when youthful drivers have been at the wheel in accidents that have left 10 Orange County teens dead and more than another dozen badly injured.

While Marshall cannot bring back the images of his own accident in his memory or dreams, he had the chilling sense that history was repeating itself a few weeks ago, as he heard the news reports of a July 29 crash outside Victorville.

The pattern was eerily familiar. Four local teens were dead in an accident that was almost a mirror image of his own.

In both cases, a sports utility vehicle packed with young people was racing down a desert road after a weekend of partying. In each accident, the truck flipped and rolled, hurtling bodies through the air. Both times, police found beer cans strewn among the wreckage.

The suspected causes of each crash were also painfully similar: Speed and alcohol and youthful hubris.

“It makes you wonder if there is any way to stop these things from happening,” said Marshall, who now addresses students and other groups to share his cautionary tale. “The same thing over and over. Another one down.”

Just 12 days after the desert crash that killed four Katella High School students, two Fountain Valley 16-year-olds died in the back seat of a candy-apple red 1968 Mustang, which was allegedly traveling faster than 70 m.p.h. on a residential street when it clipped another car and slammed into a tree and a utility wall, police said. The reason for the carnage? The driver was trying to get a friend to traffic school on time.

Less than a week later, an 18-year-old who authorities said was drunk veered off the road and smacked into a tree in Anaheim. A 17-year-old passenger in the car died at the hospital. Twenty minutes after that accident, another 17-year-old died in a Fountain Valley crash, an accident police attributed to racing.

In all, 20 Orange County drivers between ages 15 and 21 have died in 1995. That number does not include the four youngsters who were killed this summer as passengers in cars driven by their peers. It also does not factor in the four teens who died in the desert crash.

They are society’s newest drivers, and often the most fearless. Everyone from parents to cops to emergency room nurses asks why they do it, why they ignore all the warnings with an exasperated roll of their eyes. In fact, they know, because they all have been there.

At 16 or 17, a week in a classroom or at work feels like a year, so the weekend must be packed to the limits with fun. For a teen, a car is freedom, and freedom demands to be celebrated.

Johnny Yanes knows the urges that push young people to go faster. Yanes himself used to live the fast life--and it showed. At 21, nothing mattered more than partying with his buddies, enjoying the warm buzz of beer and pot, the energizing rush of cocaine and street races, he said.

On the night the paramedics picked him up off the street, Yanes was riding his father’s brand new motorcycle. He was drunk and high, he said, and didn’t think twice about accepting a challenge to race.

“I was going 100, maybe,” Yanes, now 35, said. “Too fast.”

The bike began to wobble and Yanes careened out of control. When he came out of his coma a month later, the witnesses who visited him said the sliding bike trailed sparks for about 50 feet before Yanes was tossed clear.

The physical therapists helped him rise up out of his wheelchair in less than 10 months. The plastic surgeons, remarkably, managed to rebuild his face. But no one could help Yanes completely rebound from the brain damage.

Nowadays, his memory is like a bad phone connection, fading in and out and sometimes failing altogether. He has mood swings and bouts with depression. His reading skills are those of a fourth-grader. He can’t hold onto any one job longer than eight months. He hopes a new job at a Costa Mesa carwash will change his luck.

“I have been single a long time,” the Garden Grove resident said. “I used to have three or four girlfriends, before the accident, you know? Now it is really hard to hold a relationship. I have problems with my family; I get angry. . . .”

Yanes’ pain is evident. The scars on his shoulders and legs are from the unforgiving pavement, but the narrow slashes on the inside of his left wrist are by his own hand. It has been a decade since he tried to kill himself, but the suffering remains.

“Life is pretty hard,” he said, staring at the red slashes. “I miss the way I used to be. Tell the people, the young people, not to do stupid things when they drive. The mistakes don’t go away.”

Yanes’ mistakes are familiar ground for Anne Marie Bredehoft, who spent two years working with Orange County teen-agers convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Bredehoft was a facilitator for a court-ordered program that made the youths see firsthand the potential consequences of their actions.

More than 500 area teens passed through Bredehoft’s discussion groups and took the program’s often grisly tours of the UC Irvine Medical Center’s intensive care unit and the Orange County coroner’s office. The sights of mangled cadavers and auto accident victims quaking in pain often force the youths to shed their illusions of invulnerability.

“They all think it can’t happen to them,” Bredehoft said. “But then, as they are walking through these places and they see people their own age, and the nurse tells them, ‘We don’t expect this girl to live through the night,’ well, that shakes them up a bit. I think something like that stays with them.”

Psychiatrist Paul Blair of Orange, who specializes in trauma situations and victim counseling, said lack of life experience and the cozy shelter of adolescence breed a feeling of immunity in youths.

“Bad things happen to other people” is how Blair sums it up. “A lot [of these kids] have not been exposed to terrible things. So to encounter these things is like a thunderbolt out of the blue.”

Chris Rommel was 19 when his admittedly poor judgment cost him a sizable chunk of his future. A U.S. Marine at the time, Rommel was on his motorcycle one afternoon seven years ago, dogging the rear bumper of “a geezer in a big boat of a car” on a two-lane road near Camp Pendleton. Rommel had just put in some major hours on kitchen detail and he wanted to get home to Orange fast.

He could not pass on the left, so he gunned his engine and rode alongside the car, hugging the right shoulder. But he didn’t account for the curve in the road that forced the big car to swing wide and collide with him.

“Just my luck,” Rommel said last week at the Clubhouse, a recreation and therapy facility in Orange for people recovering from head injuries. He snapped his fingers. “It happened just like that. My life went to hell, man. Hell on earth.”

Rommel flew about 100 feet after his bike smacked into the car. His forehead was shattered and his face swollen and ragged.

“The life I had before the accident and the life after. . . . There was a 100% change,” Rommel said, again snapping his fingers. “When I woke up in the hospital, I thought I was going to die. Then after that I wished I had died.”

His military career and ambition to become an architect are nothing but vague memories in a muddled mind. He tires easily and his conversations veer into odd tangents.

“Nobody wants to be around people like me,” he said. “They think brain-injured people are retarded or weird or whacked out or whatever. I wonder why it happened? You can’t know what it’s like.”