POULSBO — Jenna Uher lay dead, blood spattered, in a prom dress on the hood of a truck freshly mangled with a four-passenger car which it struck head on somewhere along State Route 305.

Her prom date, Wes Deshano, screamed in disbelief, looking at his lifeless girlfriend and waiting for emergency vehicles to arrive.

Fortunately for Uher, that scene was not reality, but a gruesome reminder of what could be.

The incident was no accident. It was sponsored by North Kitsap High School’s LINK Club, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office, Poulsbo Police Department, Suquamish Police Department, North Kitsap Fire & Rescue, Poulsbo Fire Department, Washington State Patrol and Northwest Airlift in an effort to prevent inattentive, reckless and drunk driving on prom weekend.

The April 28 mock car crash at Vikings Stadium seems to have worked as no NKHS student accidents occurred prom night. Even so, the event had an even longer-lasting effect on some spectators.

“It’s hard to watch because you know some of those people,” NKHS senior Briona Miodaugh said as she looked upon the horrific prom night crash scene. “It’s one of those things that hasn’t happened yet, but you hope that people will walk away having learned something.”

That was the intent of the afternoon as the entire NKHS student body, joined this year by Spectrum Community School students, watched a spine-chilling scenario of the dreaded effects of drunk and reckless driving. Though it is a scene that can too often be written off as “it will never happen to me” in North Kitsap, it’s an all-too-real situation.

Last year, NKHS lost two students to traffic accident-related deaths, while everyday 50 people nationwide die in car accidents. Assemblies like Friday’s mock crash are aiming to change that statistic.

“In the World Trade Center attack, we lost 3,000 Americans, it was a terrible tragedy,” Kitsap County Sheriff Steve Boyer said prior to the assembly. “Every month, we lose the same number on our (nation’s) highways, and you can do something about that.”

When the assembly began, screams and chaos rang through the stillness of a silent stadium — the reality of what could be dropped on the audience like a ton of bricks. Wide eyes and dropped jaws filled students’ faces as they watched their peers act out the grim panic.

“We’ve got a head-on collision on highway 305, possibly fatality … alcohol involved,” the mock 911 call echoed.

“We usually do (the mock crash) the day before prom to try to make sure that students think twice about making some bad decisions,” said LINK sponsor JoAnn Salwei. “We started these in ‘98 and we’ve not had a major incident since then. I think (the message) gets across to the majority of the kids.”

Salwei said the group tries to keep the mock crash as real as possible with NK students, crashed vehicles, and local emergency responders. The group has been working since December in coordination with emergency response agencies to put the ghastly display together, she added.

“Anybody who helps out with this, it’s all-volunteer time,” Salwei said.

“We’re willing to dedicate resources to it because we feel that it injects an element of reality into teens’ minds when they are thinking about making choices,” said NKF&R public information officer Michelle Laboda. “Not only about impaired driving but the many driving scenarios that could lead to a crash like that which was replicated Friday.