One Wrong Move : In an instant, their lives changed--and others’ ended. For teens who make a mistake behind the wheel, the pain never ends.

This is a story of young lives changed in an instant, of bloodied bumpers and broken bodies, grieving parents and tearful classmates. It is a story not of those who died, but rather those who lived, knowing their actions were the cause--however accidentally--of another’s death.

In August, four Anaheim High School athletes died when the Chevy Suburban they were riding in crashed near Victorville. Police found more than 40 empty beer cans strewn about the wreckage. Days later, two Fountain Valley teens died in a high-speed crash en route to a drivers’ education class.

Every year in this country, some 5,000 young drivers--most of them male, a third of them drunk--get behind the wheel of a car and kill someone, often another teen-ager, often a friend.

*

It was the last day of 1981 and Kevin Tunell, armed with his older brother’s ID and a plan for New Year’s Eve, drove to a market near his home in Fairfax, Va., and “scored” two bottles of champagne. After a full night of partying--and drinking--Tunell was, as he put it, “feeling no pain” by the time he started out for home on early New Year’s Day.

When friends tried to stop him, Tunell brushed them off with the famous teen motto: “Nothing ever happens to me!”

But a mile or so from his home, something did happen. As Tunell’s big gray Dodge rounded a blind curve, it swerved across the double yellow line and into the path of Susan Marie Herzog’s tiny compact.

The force of the impact fractured her skull, broke her neck, both of her arms and both of her legs. She died instantly. Tunell walked away with a bump on the head and a few cuts.

Later, as he sat in the lockup surrounded by police, “What I’d done sounded an awful lot like murder to me. I was terrified,” Tunell recalls.

Because it happened on a Friday and because Susan Marie Herzog was 18 years old, Susan’s grieving parents reasoned that it was only right that Kevin should pay for what he did every Friday for 18 years.

With the court’s approval, Tunell, then only 17, agreed to write out a $1 check in the dead girl’s name and send it to her family every Friday of every week of every month until the year 2000.

After nearly six years of check-writing, Tunell stopped. “It just hurt too much to continue,” he told a judge. Instead, Tunell offered the Herzogs 12 years’ worth of checks in a box. They gave it back.

The whole point, the Herzogs reminded, is to make sure Tunell “never forgets that he killed our daughter.”

As if he ever could.

In a country where car crashes--with or without alcohol--still kill more 15- to 20-year-olds than guns, disease, drowning or any other cause, Kevin Tunell was for a time the most famous adolescent drunk driver in the land.

Make that the most famous repentant drunk driver.

After pleading guilty in a Virginia juvenile court to DWI manslaughter, Tunell was ordered not only to write 18 years of checks to his victim but also to publicly confess his crime, over and over again.

Turning his tragedy into a cautionary tale for other teens was inspired, says educator John Berndt of the L.A. County Office of Education’s Friday Night Live program to deter youths from drinking and driving. He remembers student, as well as adult, audiences transfixed by the sweet-faced Tunell’s tearful telling of the worst night of his life.

Although Kevin never was charged as a murderer, some people treated him like one.

As he told auditoriums full of high school students, “I realized there were hundreds and hundreds of people who hated me. Her sisters, her parents, her best friend in school and her best friend at church. They all just wanted to take my head and rip it off my shoulders because I took away one of their best friends and they didn’t even have a chance to say goodby.

“I can tell you if you end up in my shoes, you won’t like it, you won’t like it one bit,” he warned.

For years, he says, he was haunted not only by what he had done but by visions of Susan herself. At night, and sometimes during the day, Tunell would be seized with a chilling premonition “that she was coming to visit.”

While the dead girl seemed to always be with him, Tunell says that after the accident, some of his friends were not.

“They sort of disappeared. It seemed like no one wanted to know me anymore.” Even today, thousands of miles from his past, friendships can be difficult. “It’s awkward to explain what I did for all those years. When I do tell people the truth, it’s awfully hard to believe,” Tunell says.

“When you’re young, you think nothing bad can ever happen to you. And, even if it does, so what? You get over it, you move on. Let me tell you, it’s not that easy knowing that while you’re alive, somebody else is dead.”

Although he doesn’t dwell on it, he dreads the coming of what he calls “the anniversary.” He won’t make plans for New Year’s Eve. “It’s generally just a time for reflection, I guess, and . . . “ Tunell takes a big breath. “Let’s just say it’s a touchy time. There have been some rough ones.”

He lives in Arizona now, working in public relations for an organization that knows little about what he’s been through.

He says the accident has made him more compassionate. “I’m not so quick to judge people anymore,” he says, “not so fast to hate, to be angry at others for mistakes.”

Occasionally, that forgiveness includes himself.

“I got a speeding ticket not so long ago, so, you see, I’m not an angel. I am a better person, no question, but I have my faults like anybody else. I have to live with that. Just like I live with everything else.”

*

Drinking and driving kills fewer than half as many young people today than it did the year Kevin Tunell killed Susan Marie Herzog.

But other factors, as the National Traffic Highway Safety Administration terms them, have proven to be just as lethal.

Jim Wright, who tracks youth deaths for the agency, says, “The normal teen-age driving pattern is often already impaired by poor judgment, inexperience, immaturity and dangerously divided attentions.”

Almost 40 years have passed since those factors came together in one horrific moment for Brad Miller.

Since the instant it happened, since the car began its wild tumble down the embankment, flinging six-foot boys out the windows like so many rag dolls, his memory of the accident has been a blur.

He cannot even recall the exact date now, but it was probably in July or August--the months, not coincidentally, experts say most teen-agers die in traffic accidents.

It was the summer of 1959, that much is certain. And who could ever forget the car--a classic red-on-white 1956 Chevrolet convertible. Slick is the word he still uses to describe it.

Miller isn’t his real name. He asked that his real name not be printed because he doesn’t want to talk about the accident anymore--the accident and then what happened later.

A football star at a Midwestern high school, Miller would go on to play for two pro teams. His compact build and gentle disposition made him an unlikely member of some of the biggest, meanest backfields in the history of the game. And few, if any, of his teammates ever guessed the bruising sorrow he played with.

He was a fun-loving 16-year-old back in 1959 when he and his buddies took off in the Chevy for Florida.

It was somewhere in Arkansas that they got this “crazy idea” to change drivers. The crazy part was that they would change without stopping.

“Rather than stop the car, which takes time and all that, we thought we’d slow way down and I’d crawl over and take the wheel,” Miller recalls. “At the time, it didn’t really seem so irresponsible as it sounds now. It was the middle of the day and there were no bends or turns. It would’ve been maybe an easy thing to do . . . except somebody’s foot hit the accelerator.

Like many young people today--and most people in the ‘50s--none of boys was wearing a seat belt.

“Next thing we knew, we were really flying and the car, ah, it went over to the side of the road and down this embankment. I guess we must’ve been going fairly fast--fast enough to make the car roll over anyway. I know we all kind of woke up on the ground, dazed like, and everybody seemed pretty OK--everybody but Sparky.”

His friends called him Sparky because “that’s just the way he was. Real upbeat, full of energy,” Miller says.

But, after the crash, the nickname seemed to mock the contorted form laid out silently on the grass.

Miller apologizes for not remembering what happened next. “I don’t talk about this, see? I haven’t really, for years. It, well, it still tears me up.”

The four friends rode together to the hospital--three of them sitting up, one strapped motionless to a stretcher. The horror of what lay ahead for their friend was devastating to the three who walked away from the accident.

Sparky, who had been riding in the back seat of the Chevy when it crashed, never walked again. But that didn’t change anything, Miller insists. “Nothing changed at all as far as I was concerned and as far as he was concerned. His dad called me once and said he’d like my permission to try to seek some sort of compensation from the insurance company and, of course, I said, sure. But there never was any finger-pointing or blaming.”

After graduation, the four friends went off to college together. They roomed together, dated together, “did everything together,” Miller says. And if there was ever a time when Sparky broke down and asked his friends why, Miller can’t recall it.

After college, Miller went off to the NFL; Sparky to a job at a bank out west.

The friendship, which already had survived so much, easily survived the separation. “We always talked on the phone, talked and joked around like always. I never suspected anything was wrong,” says Miller, with a sudden catch in his voice.

“One day, though, I get this call from Sparky’s dad. They had found Sparky in this park near where he lived. Sparky had bought this pistol and he had shot himself in the head.”

At the request of Sparky’s family, Miller suited up and played football that afternoon.

“My heart wasn’t in it. I was, like dying inside the whole time. But, you know, it was one of the better games of my career.

“I gotta believe that Sparky was watching me. I gotta believe he still understands. . . .”

*

People who work with teen-agers, who counsel them and guide them, say their pain is different, more haunting, often more physical than that of adults.

Jan Fritsen was a counselor at Laguna Beach High School in 1983 when two cheerleaders died and another suffered permanent brain damage in a head-on collision on Laguna Canyon Road. “I will never forget how hard these youngsters grieved. They sat on the floor outside my office and sobbed so violently and so long that I had to pass out orange juices to keep them from growing lightheaded,” the Lake Forest therapist recalls.

It is not unusual for adolescents to slip into shock after witnessing or even hearing about the sudden death of a friend.

Craig Ramirez believes that explains what happened to him. “Trouble is,” he says, “I still can’t snap out of it.”

He is a peace officer--barrel-chested, strong, mostly silent.

The law enforcement agency he works for in California doesn’t know about the secret in his past because arrest records as a juvenile were sealed. For that reason, Ramirez is a pseudonym.

Sitting in a restaurant last month with tears streaming down his face, the 33-year-old father of five acknowledges the obvious: “It’s still painful to talk about this.”

“This” is the fatal accident he caused 18 years ago.

He talks about it “only when absolutely necessary.” And over the years, that has not been very often.

He didn’t have to tell his wife. As his high school sweetheart, she already knew. But after his divorce when he began seriously dating again, he was forced to tell the story “to explain why I am the way I am, why I’m not always feeling on top of the world.”

And then, a year or two ago when his sons neared driving age, he had to tell them because, well, he guesses it’s because he didn’t want the same thing to happen to them.

What happened, and he squeezes shut his eyes as if to conjure the picture more clearly in his mind, began innocently enough on a hot July afternoon in 1977.

“My sister was out of town and I was driving her car. I had it for the whole weekend. What a car! It was a 240Z. Remember those? Beautiful car.”

He and a group of friends had been at a swim party and were headed for another party nearby. “Just another great summer in L.A., you know?”

He was a good kid who worked bagging groceries at a market. And he was a good driver, a proud graduate of drivers ed.

One of the boys at the pool begged a ride. “I’ve blocked it out for years. I’m sorry. It’s hard to talk about.” After a long pause, he continues. “Anyway, I guess, yeah, I guess we must’ve been racing to see who could get over there first.

“It was only two miles, but I took this corner too fast or something, and I sideswiped a parked car.

“I was pretty shook up, but not really hurt. I remember walking over to the passenger side of the car and opening the door--and the whole door came off. And my friend, he was just lying there.

“Then I just remember looking up at all my friends all gathered around and hearing a paramedic say, ‘Hey, this guy has no pulse!’

“Next thing I know they’re taking me to jail. I’m still thinking to myself, ‘I got to get out of here by 7. I got plans!’ I was going to the movies. The movies . . . right.”

Instead, Ramirez--no shoes, no shirt, his bathing suit still wet from swimming--spent the next 20 hours in jail. An involuntary shiver goes through him as he describes how he shook all night until his parents came to take him home.

While he was in the lockup, he says he saw another prisoner being beaten; when he begged the turnkey to let him out, he was told, “You’re not going nowhere for a while, son. You just killed somebody.”

“I thought, ‘This is the end. I’ll never be out of jail. I’ll never have a normal life.’ ”

He was charged with vehicular manslaughter. Despite a light sentence and extensive counseling, and even despite growing up to take a job helping teen-agers, Ramirez says that on one point, he was right.

“No matter what I do, what anybody does, you cannot go on to have a so-called normal life after something like this.

“I went over to his parents’ house the day of the funeral and I told them, I told them how sorry I was, but to this day, I don’t know what happened about it. I don’t know if my parents ever made a settlement or anything. My family never speaks of it with me. Never.

“But even if I don’t talk about it, it’s still right here, like it happened yesterday.

“I remember going back to school and I was still on probation. Everybody seemed to know about it. Like it was the major topic. I went to a party once and a girl came up to me and said, ‘You’re the one who was in that big accident, aren’t you?’

“Once my probation officer came to see me at school and one of my teachers called out in the classroom, ‘Hey, your probation officer is here. What the hell did you do wrong?’

“It was tough enough just being a teen-ager. With this on top of that, I pretty much went . . . well, later on, somebody diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress syndrome. I guess that pretty much explains it.

“So now, I’m starting to make a new life and put this terrible thing behind me, but you know what? I still can’t seem to accept any kind of happiness that comes to me. I just can’t. I feel like I don’t deserve to be happy.”