A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Victim Delivers a Message on Drunk Drivers

Michele Sapper has told her story hundreds of times.

She’s told it at high schools, where large crowds of rowdy teenagers suddenly become quiet and respectful when she speaks. She’s told it to community groups, police groups and to convicted drunk drivers.

“I’ve gotten to the point that I’ve done this so much I really feel like I’m telling someone else’s story,” said Sapper, 32, standing in the middle of her parents’ living room, surrounded by enlarged photos. The gruesome photos depict the aftermath of an accident caused by a drunk driver that nearly killed Sapper 12 years ago.

One photo shows an Oldsmobile, front end smashed, shards of glass scattered everywhere, the door ripped off by the firefighters who rescued her. Two other photos show a 20-year-old Sapper, lying in a hospital bed, comatose and on a respirator.

Her mother took some of the photos with the intention of one day showing them to her daughter--even though doctors were not sure Sapper would live to see them.

“I always took pictures of Michele,” Bobbie Sapper said, “because I knew she would get through it and want to see what happened.”

Now Sapper uses the photos, enlarged to poster size, in her countless lectures.

Before the accident, Sapper was a junior at Cal State Northridge with hopes of becoming a child psychologist. She was returning to her dorm room to write a psychology paper one day when her Oldsmobile was struck by a one-ton pickup truck that had crossed the center line on Plummer Street. A doctor who lived nearby saved her life.

“I did die,” said Sapper, now a specialist reserve officer with the Los Angeles Police Department Valley Traffic Bureau. “I was brought back to life by CPR.”

She was in a coma for two months, and after she gained consciousness, doctors told her she would not walk again. But she did. She also returned to school and graduated from UCLA 5 1/2 years later. Although speech was difficult at first--one word per breath in the early stages of her recovery--she now speaks clearly, if still slowly.

“My speech has made me the speaker that I am,” said Sapper, named one of 10 Reserve Officers of the Year from the Valley in 1995. An LAPD speaker for five years, she lives with her parents in Beverly Hills.

Although the slowness of her speech has prevented her from finding a paying job, it commands an audience’s attention when she delivers her talks on the dangers of drinking and driving.

Delivering this message is her purpose in life, and why she keeps telling her story.

Sapper is Jewish and although she is not particularly religious, an Orthodox rabbi she met early in her recovery told her she would one day “know why this happened,” she said.

A couple of years after the accident, when she first spoke to an elementary school, she realized, “God kept me alive to lecture against drunken drivers,” Sapper said.

Ironically, Sapper had been afraid of public speaking before the accident, but now she is a focused and compelling orator.

Recently, Sapper spoke at a gathering of police chiefs in Aspen, Colo., and was filmed for British and German television. She has been invited to give talks around the country.

“People never meet people like me,” Sapper said. “That’s why there are people like me.”

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