‘You need to be paying attention’: Girl Scout raises distracted driving awareness for Gold Award

Alex Rudick’s plan for her Girl Scout Gold Award quickly changed in 2017.

Now, the Hewitt-Trussville High School junior is on the cusp of earning the highest honor that can be bestowed on a Girl Scout.

Rudick’s cousin, Jessica Butler, was killed May 26, 2017, in a distracted driving automobile accident on Interstate 459. She was 28.

“I heard about it, like car wrecks and stuff, but I didn’t know what it felt like when it’s someone you know,” Rudick said.

Rudick, more than a decade younger than her cousin, had seen Butler the month before the accident at a family outing. She didn’t know it would be the last time. Butler’s father read a letter about distracted driving at his daughter’s funeral, and Rudick knew then she wanted to bring awareness to the issue for her Gold Award project. She came home, made notes on a chalkboard and created a video. She said she then wanted to make four more videos.

“Everyone my age was about to start driving,” Rudick said. “I thought it was going to be a really good idea to get people that are actually my age group and older, so that would affect most everybody.”

Rudick is in her 13th year of Girl Scouts as a member of Troop 872. Since deciding on distracted driving as her Gold Award project, Rudick has developed a website, postcards and five videos, all in an attempt to raise awareness about the dangers of distracted driving. All the information and videos are available at onedistraction.weebly.com.

Her five videos include ways motorists are distracted, an over-exaggerated clip of distractions behind the wheel, how distracted driving is not just texting while driving, an interview with Alabama State Trooper Reginal King, and a nearly 11-minute interview with Butler’s parents and friends.

“No one really thinks about that,” Rudick said of the reaction of family and friends to a loved one’s fatal accident.

Rudick said she has learned during her project to keep both her hands on the wheel and to pay close attention to other motorists.

“You need to be paying attention,” she said. “You have to watch for other people, too.”

The last tasks of Rudick’s project were to get the word out about it. She took postcards to companies around the area, encouraging them to share her videos as a part of their safety message. Rudick posted the agreeable companies’ logos on her website as “Supporters.” She has reached out to Apple, Southern Company, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and even the White House. The cutoff for companies to respond back to Rudick is Feb. 1.

Her next goal is to use her project for change in Alabama. She wants to see this state pass a hands-free law, like the one Georgia approved in 2018, which, in part, states that drivers “cannot have a phone in their hand or touching any part of their body while talking on their phone while driving.”

Should that happen, Rudick would be thrilled.

“I’d feel pretty dang good about that,” she said.