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The Student News Website of Francis Howell North High School.

FHNtoday.com

The Student News Website of Francis Howell North High School.
The Collector Store

FHNtoday.com

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Funeral home faces reality

Dozens of calls a day. Hundreds by the end of the week. Thousands before the year is up. Voices on the other line broken with sorrow as families make the call to Baue Funeral home as they set up arrangements


for a loved one. A lost loved one.
Emily Schluter hears this almost every day.
“It’s sad,” Shluter said. “It’s so sad, but it’s part of life. At least here we can give people a nice wake and goodbye.”
Working at Baue Funeral home, staff like Shluter sees cases of death every day. In Schluter’s opinion, the most heartbreaking
and tragic case is when reports of drunk driving come in.
“It’s very painful to watch,” Shluter said. “But it happens too much. More frequently than people think. To see parents staring at just a picture of their son or daughter because that’s all they could see again is painful, especially when the child has been lost to drunk driving. I guess kids don’t realize how much it affects their loved ones.”
At Baue Funeral Homes, cases come in frequently about not just teens, but people of all ages that have died as a result of drunk driving. Although accident cases can not be released, Schluter believes the numbers are too high. Because of the enormity of numbers involving drunk driving, Baue has gone as far as to hold programs for drunk driving. Baue teams up with EMC, police, fire departments and schools to put on reenactments of drunk driving accidents for schools.
“From reports and stories we have heard, it gets really ugly,” Schluter said. “You hear it on the news all the time. Cases of these poor kids dying in the more heinous of ways.”
Baue funeral manager Scott Payne, who works so closely with families of the deceased, feels that the unnatural death of drunk driving is one of the hardest cases to deal with.
“Nobody wants to have to see a dead body,” Payne said. “But it’s almost even harder to not see a body at a wake because the bodies are so mutilated, and there are so many cases like that, it’s unnerving.”
Though Baue sees countless cases a week of this kind, the staff has hopes that not only teens, but people of all ages will see the real hurt drunk driving causes and make better choices in the future.
“Kids know the consequences and that’s why it’s so sad,” Schluter said. “They know and yet they still go out drinking. We can’t always stop them from doing it, so hopefully they have enough common sense to stay off the road, or else they are going to either hurt themselves or put someone else at risk. Kids think we sound like broken records, but it can’t be stressed enough.”

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