A Life-Or-Death Choice?

Soon Americans will probably be able to decide whether they want to turn their airbags on or off. As two very different tragedies show, the consequences of that decision couldn't be more grave.

IF WE COULD CHANGE WHAT happened to Becky Tebbetts, an 18-year-old college student, late one night in 1991, where would we start? With a tap on the brakes as she drove south on New Hampshire's Route 113, a winding mountain road 20 miles from her parents' home in Gilford? Or if we could see her car miss the curve, then career across the road and down an embankment, would we change history and put an airbag in the steering wheel, to protect her head as the little Ford Escort impaled a 60-foot oak with a bang that awakened a neighbor a quarter mile away? Then perhaps on the last Friday of this September her mother, Jo-Ann, would have handed her younger daughter a bouquet of roses for her 25th birthday, rather than leaving them, as she has for seven years, at Becky's grave.

And then we would use our magical powers to undo a starkly different event from last Christmas morning, when 6-year-old Andrew Evans of Omaha, Neb., headed off for church in his mother's 1995 Plymouth Voyager, with his grandmother Sue Ellen Burgess at the wheel. It was just the two of them, on a clear morning, with the streets dry and traffic so light that it seemed harmless to let Andrew sit in the front without a seat belt. Rolling cautiously at 20 miles an hour through an intersection, Burgess never saw another car run a red light until the instant before they collided, just hard enough for the passenger-side airbag to fire. The bag, erupting from the dashboard at 200 miles an hour, caught Andrew at just the right angle to break his neck between the second and third cervical vertebrae, leaving him a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic, probably for the rest of his life.

These terrible events can never be undone, but American society does have a mechanism for the retroactive redress of such tragedies. It is the lawsuit. Millions of dollars could ultimately be sought from the respective carmakers in these two accidents, for their alleged negligence in failing to install airbags in one instance, and for allegedly installing an unsafe airbag in another. And those two arguments represent the two painful sides of the airbag dilemma. On the one hand, airbags do save lives-2,505 to date, safety experts say. But airbags also cost lives: at last count, 83 people, mostly small adults and children not wearing seat belts, have been killed by the controlled, 200-mile-per-hour explosion of sodium azide that unleashes an airbag.

The deaths have prompted a fierce national debate, complete with congressional hearings and presidential pronouncements. And since public policy these days often seems to be shaped by horrific anecdote, that debate is expected to culminate any day now in a decision by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to allow drivers to disconnect their airbags with the flip of a switch. That would force millions of Americans to face a stark question each time they get behind the wheel: do they leave the airbag on, and risk catastrophic injury like Andrew Evans's, or turn it off, and risk dying like Becky Tebbetts?

Brown-haired, hazel-eyed Becky was a voracious reader who graduated from high school a year early thanks to good grades and a heavy courseload. At 18 she had finished three semesters at the University of New Hampshire and was hoping to study drama and move to New York City someday. More than six years after Becky's death, her parents are still too upset to talk to a reporter about it; their surviving daughter, Christine, describes them as "emotional cripples." When Becky died, Christine was serving in the army in Saudi Arabia; afterward she earned a law degree and joined attorney Ted McKean's firm, which now represents the family in its suit against Ford. After the accident Christine drove over and over down the stretch of road where her sister died, hoping "the sky would suddenly open up and explain why it happened." Now the S-curve in the quiet country lane that meanders around Squam Lake is marred with painted green and yellow numbers, letters and arrows left by accident-reconstruction experts trying to answer the same question. Christine has no doubts about who is to blame. "It makes my parents angry to learn that my sister could have walked away from this accident," she says. "What they want is for Ford to be held accountable for the marketing decisions it made." The trial begins Nov. 3.