LITTLE ROCK — Teah Flynn of Fayetteville may be only 10, but you'd never know that by the powerful DVD, "DUI and Me," that she helped create.
The DVD pleads with adults not to consume alcohol, then climb behind the wheel of a vehicle like the one that claimed her mother's life in 2002.
Teah, a fifth-grader at Fayetteville Christian School, spent two months with an adult, John Stauffacher, writing and producing the heartfelt three-minute video. In the film, she memorializes her mother Leah while asking viewers not to drink and drive or get into a car with an intoxicated person behind the wheel.
Her mother's death wasn't an accident, Teah exclaims in the video.
"The driver chose to drink and drive. He killed my mama!"
Five years ago tomorrow, just before daylight, 32-year-old Leah Flynn died after the car in which she was riding missed a winding turn off Arkansas 16 West less than a mile from her home and crashed into a roadside ditch. The driver somehow survived the crash, which flattened the vehicle's roof, but subsequently spent 10 months in prison.
Leah also had been drinking that evening, but had the foresight to summon a sober friend to drive her home. However, rather than defer to the sober friend, her male companion had insisted that he was sober enough to drive her vehicle home from the lounge on Fayetteville's Dickson Street. He got his way.
Yet his way left Teah, an only child, to be adopted and raised by grandparents Daun Flynn and George Schmitt.
"We were so close all through her life," Daun said of her late daughter. "We had moved to Fayetteville from Florida yearsago to be near her. Leah had a fear of flying without Teah because she couldn't bear the thought that something might happen and Teah would be left alone."
Teah said she got the idea for making the DVD after attending an acting workshop in California. It took her and Stauffacher about a month to write the script, rehearse it and film it.
"They told us at the camp that anyone can make a movie nowadays, so we did," she said.
Teah's mother was well known in Fayetteville as the founder of the Travel Depot agency. She had opened the business while still in college, and her mother had helped manage it. After the fatal crash, Leah's mother and stepfather moved the business to Leah's original home along Arkansas 16. Someday the house will belong to Teah, Daun said.
"We wanted to find a way to keep that home for her."
Appearing in the DVD sporting a black-and-white striped outfit and waistlength hair, Teah strolls through a waterfall setting and talks about spending their last weekend with her mother in Branson, Mo., and the "train park" they often visited together.
"Mama was such a happy person," she said. "I know she's in Heaven watching over me. I want her to be proud of me."
Daun remembers her daughter as being bright and intensely motivated.
"She never had enemies because she was so good to everyone and sensitive toward them," she added.
For the past five years, the family has placed an ad in the newspaper on Leah's birthday, Mother's Day and the day of her death. The sizable ad features a photo of Leah with Teah at age 5 in which readers are asked not to drink and drive.
"Don't kill someone else's mommy," it states.
Teah said she helped select the clothes and casket for her mother's funeral, and even helped find just the right spot in the cemetery overlooking trees and a pond.
"Mama didn't like being cold, so I picked out a sweatsuit for her," she explains in the video.
Word of the DVD is spreading. Teah said she sent a copy to Paris Hilton for obvious reasons and another to CNN's Nancy Grace. Daun said MADD has expressed an interest in it, as has the Fayetteville Police Department for possible youth training. I suspect that before the ripples from this effort clear, honor student Teah Lorraine Flynn's DVD will have had an impact across the nation in a number of ways.
A person who drinks and drives or climbs into a car with an intoxicated driver "doesn't plan on killing somebody, but it happens in a heartbeat," Teah says. "I don't want anybody else's mother to be killed." Good for you, Teah. Mothers shouldn't die. But rest assured that your mother undoubtedly is as proud of her daughter as your grandparents are, along with so many others who believe in your noble crusade.
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Staff columnist Mike Masterson is the former editor of three Arkansas daily newspapers.
Editorial, Pages 99 on 10/07/2007