Just this weekend, we started the ball rolling for the next step after the Underride Roundtable. I posted about our idea and then sent out an email to the people who attended that event–inviting them to a follow-up meeting to hammer out a specific and comprehensive underride rule proposal to submit, as a group, to NHTSA in hopes of shaping their final underride rule to be as effective as humanly possible.

Yesterday, I was struggling with feelings of uncertainty about what-did-I-think-I-was-doing?! Who-do-I-think-I-am to try to make things happen like that? Then, I went and got the mail and found a thick manila envelope addressed to me from the School of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle. I thought, What’s this? I haven’t been in contact with anyone there.

After I opened it and started reading the cover letter, I started crying and thanking the Lord for His guidance to our family over these last three years as we have worked relentlessly to put an end to preventable crash deaths. This letter was a gentle but powerful affirmation that He has indeed been using our family (with all of our strengths & weaknesses) as His vessels to bring about needed change. May it be so.

This is an excerpt from that letter:

We are law professors at the University of Washington in Seattle, and we are writing because we have been deeply moved by your website in memory of your daughters and inspired by your campaign to improve truck safety by mandating new underride protections. Between the two of us, we have five children, and we now never drive on the highway without thinking about your family’s accident and the need for increased safety measures.

We found your website when we were researching and co-authoring a law review article titled “Visualizing Rulemaking,” which discusses the way that people are harnessing the power of visual images and social media to influence the federal administrative rulemaking process. We describe your rulemaking campaign as an excellent and powerful example of ordinary citizens using modern, highly visual tools to effect change in the regulatory realm. Kathryn Watts and Liz Porter

The two photos which they want to use:

The professors included a copy of the draft of their 95-page article, which will be available digitally in a few weeks and published in the NYU Law Review in November. I will share the links when they are available.

Here we are with another way that Mary is getting her wish, “I want to be famous someday. I don’t know how, but I just do,” Mary wrote to herself a few weeks before her crash.