The Grim Reaper visits North Beach high

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Earlier this week, North Beach High School’s Teens Against Destructive Decisions (TADD) conducted a sobering two-day exercise involving role playing as part of the Every 39 Minutes Program. The program is an interactive simulation designed to educate students about the dangers of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

According to statistics provided by longtime North Beach TADD advisor Jodi Brown, one person dies every 39 minutes in the United States from impaired driving. This rate equals approximately 37 fatalities every day. The program was formerly named “Every 32 Minutes,” indicating a statistical decrease in annual drunk driving deaths due to increased awareness and safety campaigns.

Select students and parents fell on two sides of a tragic coin to demonstrate the real-world consequences of bad decisions involving driving under the influence, drug and alcohol addiction, and distracted behavior.

The mechanics of the exercise included:

Periodic audio cues: A bell sounded over the loudspeaker every 39 minutes to mark a statistical death.

The Grim Reaper: An actor entered classrooms to select predetermined student “victims” by touching their shoulders.

Obituaries: The school read a brief biography of the selected student over the intercom as they exited.

Visual transformation: Selected students returned to class wearing black shirts and white face paint.

The living dead rule: “Victims” remained completely silent for the rest of the day to simulate their absence.

Final assembly: All participants gathered outside at dismissal to show the cumulative total of lives lost during a single school day.

On Monday, the mechanics played out as a student was “accused” of vehicular manslaughter in the fictional “death” of another student. During an assembly in Larry Moore’s House of Pain on the second day, the offending student delivered a heartfelt apology for his actions while his mother described the imagined thoughts and feelings she may have experienced when the police knocked on her door to tell her what her son had done.

Then, the parents of the pretend victim gave a mock eulogy. Physical education teacher Peter Fry took on the role of the aggrieved parent. He described his son from birth through childhood and lamented all the things he wouldn’t get to do. In the end, he forgave the person responsible for his son’s “death.”

“You have to do things like this to sometimes learn lessons that otherwise you might just brush away. We all tend to think this kind of stuff doesn’t happen to us. You have to actively think about these kinds of things and live your life in a way so that you can try to avoid tragedies like this. This is the best way to learn that,” Fry said. “Like I alluded to in my mock eulogy … I tried to actually just put myself in a practical standpoint. I knew that this was fictional, but I tried to remove that and just say … ‘What if it was real? What would I really say and how would I really feel, or what would I really want to convey?’ I just had to step out of my mental knowledge that this is not real, and say, ‘No, I’m gonna pretend for the next half hour that it is real.’”

Tuesday’s “Grim Reaper” assembly began with remarks from Ocean Shores Police Sergeant Daniel Fode regarding the death notifications police officers perform as part of their duties and remarked, “nothing compares to a parents’ death of a child.”

The assembly concluded with a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching speech by Corinne Salameh, whose son Luke died in 2025 as the result of escalating destructive decisions he made unbeknownst to her despite her efforts to be an engaged, doting mother. She said he pursued the ultimate high and made the choice to do so. Salameh said she hoped that the North Beach students would “stop and weigh the consequences before you make your choice.”

Salameh recalled how her son earned straight A’s in high school and college and hid his substance abuse until it caught up with him during a trip to Southeast Asia. She described in detail a surreal scene in a morgue in Thailand and her heartbreak and waking nightmare as she brought him home in an urn.

Throughout the assembly, more than one student became overwhelmed with emotion and had to excuse themselves to regain their composure.

TADD, also known as Students Against Destructive Decisions or SADD, is a national organization. According to SADD’s official website, “SADD empowers and mobilizes students and adult allies to engage in positive change through leadership and smart decision-making.”

Junior Arabella Porter, the North Beach TADD president, said that it is important to her to help her fellow students and demonstrate the negative consequences of destructive decisions.

“It’s a really big interest of mine to help improve my peers’ lives, people around me, and I only want the best for them. Today was really hard for a lot of us. Yesterday was really hard for a lot of us,” Porter said. “Today, I just wanted to try and encourage people to not make bad decisions, to make good choices for the rest of their lives. And to hear experiences from people who really suffered from something like this, or who had to pretend, go through something like this, which still obviously weighed on them heavily. I just wanted people to see how this can affect other people, so they can make the choices to not do that to their own selves.”