Killed by drunken driver, Delaware student's legacy endures

The phone rang at 2:07 a.m.

"This is Christiana Hospital. Is this Ms. Logan?" the voice on the other line said.

"Yes, it is," she replied.

"Is your son Cameron?" the voice asked.

"Where is my son?"

That is how Connie Logan's nightmare started.

On May 6, 2001, 18-year-old Cameron Logan, a senior at the Salesianum School in Wilmington, pulled into the intersection of Murphy Road and U.S. 202 when a drunken driver careened through a red light at 80 mph.

The car smashed into the driver's side of Cameron's car, crumpling it like an accordion.

"The whole way down to the hospital, I bargained with God," Connie Logan said. "Make my son OK. I'll quit my job. I'll sell my home. Just make my son OK."

By the time she made it to the hospital, he was already gone. She fell to her knees and screamed.

"She murdered my son," Connie Logan said. "She couldn't have been more efficient if she had put a gun to his head."

She has told this story countless times, to classes full of high school and college students.

But that doesn't make it any less raw in the telling.

When she talked to a criminal justice class at the University of Delaware on Wednesday, her voice was measured, warm, friendly. She is a retired teacher, and you can tell that she is comfortable addressing a class full of kids.

She brags about her son like any good mother should. He was a writer, she says, penning essays he shared among friends in a time before Facebook made it second-nature for teenagers to open their thoughts with others.

"He was the most perceptive person I've ever met. It was uncanny," she said. "He always knew the right questions to ask. He always knew where people were coming from, no matter who it was, and that drew people to him."

She showed students a framed photo of Cameron — tie draped around his shoulders, grinning, confident, invincible in youth.

He was not perfect, she says, because nobody is. He was arrested for underage drinking once.

But after weeks of being grounded, the way he talked Connie into giving him back his driver's license was by saying he wanted to be his friends' go-to designated driver. He didn't want anyone to get hurt.

Which is why, when she talks about how a 19-year-old's bad decision to drive drunk slashed short a future of amazing promise, her eyes well red behind her red-rimmed teacher's spectacles and her practiced teacher voice cracks and wavers.

Death and anger and grief are major characters in her story. She wants every young person to know that, if they make the choice to drink and drive, they may very well become a killer.

"Don't ever call this an accident," Connie Logan said. "My son is dead because of a choice, a choice she made."

But the other issue she addresses is perhaps even tougher. When some random, horrible tragedy takes away someone you love, how do you pick up the pieces? How do you cope?

How do you heal?

Connie is not the only who has had to grapple with this question.

Chris Fromuth was one of Cameron's best friends, and Connie was his teacher when he was younger. Like Cameron, he enjoyed sports, playing alongside him in a rec basketball league, skating and, Cameron's favorite, snow-boarding.

"Cameron was definitely somebody who challenged you, but not in a bad way," Fromuth remembers. "He wouldn't let you get away with simple, all-encompassing thoughts. He wouldn't let you just say things like, 'Well, I don't like that.' He was always asking 'Why?"

That question — why? — burned in Fromuth's thoughts the night his parents woke him up and told him that Cameron had been killed. He immediately got in his car and drove to Connie's house.

"I didn't know how to react to it," Fromuth said. "The only thing I could think of was to go be with the other people who knew him. It was all I could do."

The first school day at Salesianum after Cameron died was a mother-son Mass. Connie had been looking forward to the moment when Cameron, like all the other boys, would give his mother a carnation.

Instead of giving carnations to their own mothers, all of Cameron's friends went to Connie's house and gave them to her.

This instinct to gather together as a way of coping with the trauma of Cameron's death has endured. Every year, around Christmas, Connie says Fromuth visits her and they go to Longwood Gardens together.

Starting the year Cameron died, his friends would meet on that day to catch up and reminisce. They continued this tradition as they got older, found careers and moved away — Fromuth now lives in Minnesota, and Mike Newell, another friend, lives across the country in Seattle.

But each year, the friends re-unite. The grief may have become less acute, but the memories never got less fond.

Three years ago, the friends decided they would do something to honor Cameron's legacy. So they started the Cameron Logan Scholarship Fund to raise money for scholarships for Salesianum and Kennett High School students.

Each of the last three years, the group has raised about $10,000 in scholarships.

This year's "Cameron Logan Weekend" fundraisers are coming up soon. The Soiree, a get-together that features food and a silent auction and raffle, is scheduled for April 25 at Salesianum, and a golf scramble is planned for April 27 at Loch Nairn Golf Course in Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania.

This year, 14 years after Cameron's death, the Delaware State Troopers will award the first Cameron Logan DUI Education Awards to two troopers, one from the southern part of the state and one from the northern part.

Fromuth said Cameron's friends and family did not want the award to be about which officers racked up the most DUI arrests. Instead, they wanted it to go to those who made real efforts to let people, especially young people, know about the horrible damage choosing to drink and drive can cause.

"We're not looking to ostracize people who drink and drive," he said. "We want this to be about remembering him."

Ask any of Cameron's old friends and they'll say that Connie is the heart and soul of their group. It's her talks with students, they say, that honor him more than anything they've done.

For her part, Connie says it is cathartic to talk about Cameron, especially when she believes it might make a difference in another young person's life.

One of her main messages is the importance of finding a way to forgive. The first time she saw the woman who killed Cameron, she said she was filled with anger and hate, but she was eventually able to meet her face to face and forgive her.

"I knew I couldn't live my life like that. I couldn't be a mother to my other children. I knew I couldn't be a friend." Connie told the UD students. "When you have that anger, it doesn't eat at them. It does nothing to them. All it does is eat at you."

One of the students asked Connie how friends should approach someone who is dealing with tragedy and trauma like the kind she faced. Though everyone is different, Connie said she tells friends not to shrink from talking about Cameron.

"Yeah, I cry sometimes. I miss him dearly, every day, and it hurts," she said. "But we shouldn't be afraid of crying. Crying is not a bad thing, it's a cleansing thing."

Connie said she still tells people that she has three children. When people tell Cameron stories, and when Cameron's name is used for scholarships and awards, she swells with the same pride as any other mother.

"It means everything to me that he is still remembered 14 years later," she said. "I hope that never, ever goes away."

Contact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com, 324-2428 or on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.