SAINT CLAIR - "Never a Day Passes That We Do Not Remember."
This motto could be found on the side of the Pennsylvania Driving Under the Influence Association's moving memorial Thursday outside of Wal-Mart in the borough.
Inside the mobile memorial was a wall with more than 3,000 names of people killed by impaired drivers.
"It's a shame any names have to be on there," Steve Lohr, Hegins police chief, said. "It's not until you see all these names until you realize how serious it is."
Names on the memorial included state Sen. James J. Rhoades; Emil Yenchick, former photographer at the Hazleton Standard-Speaker; and teenagers Tara Corson, Timothy Kimber and Joseph McGeoy, who were killed in a crash at the entrance to the Fairlane Village mall 14 years ago. The earliest name dates back to the 1980s.
The list of names in the memorial is constantly growing.
"People send in the names of loved ones who died in alcohol-related crashes and we put their names on a disc. The list scrolls on the TV in the trailer," Mike Martin, event coordinator for the PA DUI Association, said.
The PA DUI Association created the mobile memorial for those who could not make it to Harrisburg to see the DUI Victims' Memorial Park, dedicated on October 2, 2003, on Front Street. The mobile memorial has been touring for seven years.
According to the PA DUI Association website, www.padui.org, the memorial garden is a place where Pennsylvanians can remember and honor their loved ones by arranging to have an engraved brick placed in the garden.
Martin said the hardest part of building the mobile memorial was figuring out how to approach the design to leave the biggest impact.
"I thought about the roads and how much this will travel, it's got to stay together. I mostly thought about the awareness, though," Martin said. "The main idea is, bottom line, don't drink and drive."
The memorial took about 30 days to complete.
Established in 1979, the PA DUI Association "is a professional organization which is working to address the DUI problem in all of its many stages - from prevention to enforcement up to, and including, adjudication and rehabilitation," according to the website.
According to the website, there were 545 Pennsylvanians who lost their lives to drunk driving last year and more than 10,529 are injured each year in alcohol-related crashes.
Lori Kane, community relations at McCann School of Business & Technology, Pottsville campus, attended the memorial to check out what she plans to bring to the campus in April 2015.
"It's a nice way to remember people who have passed on," she said.
Also in attendance was Schuylkill County District Attorney Christine Holman, who is passionate about the topic of drinking and driving safety. Holman said she hopes that the memorial will teach kids about the dangers of not only drunk driving, but distracted driving.
"If we can save kids' lives by educating them, it's worth it," Holman said. "I can only imagine as a cop telling a parent that their kid was killed by a drunk driver."
Alongside Holman was her daughter, Jacqui Pitts, 17, of Barnesville.
"I brought her here today so she can see how dangerous it is. Maybe it will sink in, even just distracted driving - texting and driving," Holman said.
The message was something Pitts said received clearly.
"It's definitely a scary thought. This is an eye opener," Pitts said. "A lot of people don't understand the impact."
Martin said the most important thing about the message the memorial sends is awareness. He reflected on one of the stories he read about an elderly woman who was killed by an impaired driver.
"She was checking her mail and a car of kids hit the woman. It's terrible," he said.
Pitts remembered a Mahanoy Area High School teacher she never had the chance to have, Jeffrey Donnelly, 51, of Barnesville, because he was killed by a drunk motorcycle driver.
"He was one turn away from getting home," Holman said.
Lohr was also moved by the memorial.
"It's so senseless. People do it consciously ... There are rides out there but they consciously drive drunk," Lohr said.
Drunk drivers may not realize how many people are impacted by their choice to drink and drive.
"There's actually someone out there that cares," Lohr said.