Leslie Taylor

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Several times a year, Sgt. Tim Wyatt, traffic coordinator for the Roanoke County Police Department, organizes a ceremony during which people are honored for wearing seat belts.

The honorees receive a plaque and a certificate, and recognition for making the "life-saving decision" to buckle up.

Wyatt typically sends out a news release through e-mail to alert the media of the ceremonies, in hopes that a newspaper or television station will deem the events worthy of coverage. Typically, they -- we -- do not.

One of his releases appeared in my e-mail inbox in late August. My initial thought: Recognition for something as second nature as wearing a seat belt?

A week later, inside this newspaper's Virginia section, was a short story of a Goshen teenager whose 2002 Honda Civic ran off the left side of the road, struck a post and overturned in a creek. He was killed. He was not wearing a seat belt.

Two weeks later, again in the Virginia section, was a story of a Covington High School junior who'd always been careful to buckle up but for some reason chose not to when he climbed in the back seat of a two-door 1996 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. The car crashed entering an off ramp. He was killed. The driver and front-seat passenger, both wearing seat belts, had only minor injuries.

In the days since, my eyes and ears have been drawn, at the end of every local traffic fatality report, to the words "was not wearing a seat belt."

I did a quick search through The Roanoke Times' computer library system to see how often those words appeared in traffic fatality stories published in our pages this year. I stopped counting at 24.

And I understood why Wyatt does what he does. You recognize an individual's action with a plaque and a certificate -- for something as basic as using a seat belt -- you elevate its life-saving importance.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration this spring released data that showed little change in driver seat belt use nationwide in 2006. In Virginia, seat belt use had been on the rise for a few years, but leveled off in 2004. According to NHTSA, roughly one of every five Virginia drivers on the road is unbuckled.

Frustrating stats for Wyatt.

"I came from a home where the car didn't move unless everyone had a seat belt on," he said. "That kind of stuck with me. When I got into this line of work, it only solidified that decision."

It is frustrating particularly for Wyatt when the message today is so pervasive but not registering with the youngest, most inexperienced drivers. He, and I, grew up without a societal push for seat belt use, without a "Click It or Ticket" campaign or laws that make failure to wear a seat belt a primary or secondary offense.

Now, "the message is out there," Wyatt said. Yet in 2006, 146 Virginia teens were killed in motor vehicle accidents, he said. Of those, 87 were not wearing seat belts.

Still, "it's not just teens," Wyatt said. "It's all age groups, all incomes, all races. There is no group of people that are disproportionately higher than others.

"But the statistics are clear that seat belts do lessen the risk of being killed in a motor vehicle crash."

So Wyatt will continue organizing ceremonies, handing out certificates and Seat Belt Safety awards. He will continue to ask uniformed officers to send him candidates for the award, based on accident reports.

He will continue to use the recognition program, "selfishly," he says, to promote seat belt use.

"It's our way of thanking people for wearing their seat belt," Wyatt said. "But it's also to make the public aware that it does make a difference."

Taylor is a member of The Roanoke Times editorial board.