Dr. Samar Masri watched the heart monitor for a few more seconds as nurses performed emergency CPR in a final attempt to revive 18-year-old Melody Babakhanians.
"Let's call her time of death at 11:44," Masri said as nurses reluctantly stopped their rhythmic pumping motions on Babakhanians' bloodied body.
Just minutes earlier, the Glendale High School student had been sent through a car windshield during a drunk-driving accident, landing on the car's hood.
Nurses pulled a white sheet over her body and closed the curtain.
Inside the emergency room at Glendale Memorial Hospital Wednesday, it was now one girl lost, with one still left to save.
Seventeen-year-old Beradin Jezeh lay just two feet away while Dr. Ed Repetti directed his nurses to order a barrage of scans as he stabilized his patient.
The head trauma Beradin sustained in the same accident would require brain surgery, but she was stable for now, he said.
Down a network of halls, in the hospital's chapel, Masri had just informed Babakhanians' parents that their daughter, Melody, had died.
"When she came to us, her heart was not working," Masri told them. "She didn't make it."
Adrinea and Wiggen Babakhanians did not weep. Instead, they stood in stunned silence as Masri left the room. A chaplain offered words of comfort that seemed to hit the ground before reaching their ears.
Hospital workers escorted the parents back to the emergency room.
"Oh, my God, what happened to you?" Adrinea Babakhanians asked her daughter's lifeless body, as if she had just returned home with a black eye.
A STAGED PURPOSE
But Melody Babakhanians would, in fact, answer her mother. She would even give her a hug, because this time, everyone involved in this fatal drunk-driving accident got second chances.
It was staged.
"We are all with reality and we need to make sure we're driving home more than just words to these kids when it comes to drunk driving — that there's consequences," Glendale Police Lt. Don Meredith said.
Those consequences — death, injury, damage, trauma, emotional pain — are what fuel the Police Department's two-day, $20,000 drunk-driving prevention program titled "Every 15 Minutes," based on statistics cited throughout the day by officers, who said every 15 minutes a person dies in the United States in an alcoholrelated traffic accident.
