Car crashes are the top killer of American teenagers. Most of the crashes result from distracted driving -- not paying attention to the road.
Ryan Didone was a fifteen-year-old passenger in a car that hit a tree. He was one of the nation's more than thirty thousand victims of traffic crashes in two thousand eight. Nearly four thousand deaths, about twelve percent, involved drivers age fifteen to twenty.
Ryan's father, Thomas Didone, is a police captain in Montgomery County, Maryland.