Students at Northern Secondary School heard a father speak about losing his teenage daughter who was distracted by her headphones and died while at an intersection.

Ned Levitt warned students about the risks that young people take and the silly mistakes that can turn deadly as it did for his eighteen year old daughter in 1995. She was out for a jog, wearing headphones and didn’t hear the oncoming traffic.

“Stacy stepped off the curb at the intersection of Ledbury and Lawrence, and she was gone,” he told students at a special assembly.

Researchers in Baltimore have found that the number of pedestrians seriously injured or killed while wearing headphones has tripled since 2004.
 
Levitt, who was speaking on behalf of smartrisk.ca, a national charity dedicated to preventing injuries and saving lives, said, “It allows me to go on  — that my life has meaning —  for a dozen years I did the bereavement work,  and now I do the injury prevention work.”