MONTICELLO - A hush fell over the Monticello High School gymnasium when the photos of Jackie appeared.

In the first two, she's a healthy, beautiful 18-year-old girl with everything to live for. But the fiery wreck that changed her life also took all her fingers, her hair, the sight in one eye and even her ability to cry. No one would recognize her scarred face as the girl in the first two photos.

"She's had over 50 operations and counting," said Andy Pruitt, a firefighter and emergency medical technician in Champaign.

Monticello students also heard from an emergency room nurse, a Champaign County deputy, Judge Jeffrey Ford of Champaign County and Jim Esworthy, who lost both his daughters at once when a drunken driver hit the family's car.

Softly, almost too softly to hear at times, Esworthy told his story, of how his daughters had also become his friends as they grew up, that one was engaged and had already planned her wedding, and the other had just graduated from high school.

"I can't communicate to you my feelings when I saw both my daughters lying in their caskets," he said. "There are no words. So much of my future was wrapped up in theirs."

Every weekend, said Carle Foundation Hospital emergency room nurse Patty Metzler, at least three people are in her emergency room with alcohol poisoning. Those, she said, are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones pass out and never wake up again.

After warning the students that some of the photos they would see were very graphic, Metzler showed them slides of some of the injuries treated at Carle due to drunken driving crashes. Those are not "accidents," she said, because someone made a deliberate decision to drive under the influence - and possibly ruin someone's life.

"The worst part of my job," she said, showing a slide of a family in the waiting room, "is this, the family waiting for us to tell them what's going on."

Senior Bryan Duff said he hoped the students realized that destructive behavior has an impact on everyone.

"We really don't hear a lot about it, but what it does to the people who abuse alcohol or drugs is, they never reach their full potential in whatever they've done," he said. "And that's probably just as sad as anything else, is the limits it places on somebody."

Students hear a lot about avoiding drugs and alcohol in junior high, said Kelly Petersen, a junior, but those warnings aren't as common in high school, and she said they should be.

Valerie Wells can be reached at vwells@;herald-review.com or 421-7982.