OCOEE, Fla. — Seventeen-year-old Amrina Sarwar was one of the hundreds of teenagers who received hands-on lessons Sunday about the dangers of distracted driving.

As Sarwar drove slowly around a course marked by orange traffic cones at the Manheim Orlando in Ocoee, driving instructor Mike Buracker coached her to send text messages to her mom, who was also at Sunday’s event. 

“Now, text mom. Tell her you changed your mind: you don’t wanna go to Starbucks [after the event], you wanna go to Dunkin’ Donuts,” Buracker said.

As a driving instructor with Ford Driving Skills For Life, Buracker travels across the country to help lead clinics just like this one. The free, interactive clinics educate newly-licensed drivers about critical crash factors: things like distracted or impaired driving, speed and space management, and pedestrian awareness.

The program, now in its 20th year, is founded on the principles of Vision Zero: a model, first implemented in Sweden, that aims to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities and severe injuries. 

It’s a program former pro wrestler Bill DeMott is more than happy to get behind.

“Everything stopped on October 10th, 2015,” DeMott told Spectrum News. That’s when his 20-year-old daughter, Keri Anne DeMott, tragically died; her vehicle was struck head-on by a drunk driver.

DeMott says it was the third D.U.I. for that driver, who was only 23 at the time. He’s now serving a mandatory 15-year prison sentence, DeMott said.

But DeMott says true accountability is hard to come by: not only for those who drive impaired but also for the judges across the state, who DeMott says are often too lenient on repeat offenders – like the one who killed his daughter. That’s something DeMott wants to see change.

“When we’re not speaking to students or traveling across the country, we work on legislation,” said DeMott, who started the Keri Anne DeMott Foundation in his daughter’s honor.

DeMott says for the past four years, he’s been trying to get a state lawmaker to sponsor his drafted legislation – which DeMott says would not create any new penalties or fines for impaired drivers, but simply enforce the existing laws Florida already has in place. 

DeMott said Florida House Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-47) helped him get the bill’s language into a proper legislative format – but to date, no state lawmaker has agreed to sponsor it.

“We have an epidemic that needs to be addressed,” DeMott said. 

To that end, he and other family members travel across the country with the Keri Anne DeMott Foundation, speaking to students from elementary school through college about how critically important it is to always drive sober and pay attention on the road. 

It’s what brought DeMott and his oldest daughter, Casey DeMott, out to Sunday’s event for newly-licensed and permitted drivers in Ocoee.

“We talk about those decisions behind the wheel, and how they affect people,” DeMott said. “These young folks – everything’s social media, right? We’re a microwave generation now; we want everything now, and we want to stay in contact.”

“We want to show the world what we’re doing. But in the course of doing that, that’s the last memory we’re giving people,” DeMott said. “I want them to know: what if that last emoji, that last picture, is the last one your family has of you?”

DeMott said the bottom line is that every decision we make behind the wheel has the potential to change countless lives forever.

“We have to figure out how to live our best life, [while] at the same time, thinking about others living theirs,” DeMott said.

Meanwhile, as new driver Sarwar struggled to juggle her cell phone and the steering wheel, Buracker, the driving instructor, told her to take a selfie and send it to her mom.

Sarwar veered off course.

“My takeaway is that texting and driving is extremely hard, and I definitely would crash if I were to text and drive on a real road,” Sarwar told Spectrum News after the exercise. “So, don’t do it.”

Vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers in the U.S., according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. In Florida, Orange County is number one for serious injuries and fatalities among driving teenagers, according to data compiled for 2016-2020 by Florida's Department of Transportation.