It has been over 18 years since Illumina Records and Ground Control President Ronald Bellanti witnessed what he calls “the darkest event of my life” but to hear him tell the story sounds like he is remembering something that occurred last week.
Bellanti, a veteran of twenty plus years in the entertainment industry was working at a concert in New York. “It was early in the afternoon, well before show time, when I struck up a conversation with a group of high school kids from the area. They were skipping school, partying in the parking lot and hoping to get a glimpse of the band at sound check.” They also, according to Bellanti, were all high on marijuana and drinking wine.
They approached Bellanti and were trying to enlist his help getting backstage, a scenario familiar to anyone who has ever worn a backstage pass. “I had gone through this routine so many times before, in a hundred cities, with a thousand kids. But something would happen this time that would set this day apart from all the others. One of the kids was this fifteen year old girl. She was just beautiful, blonde hair, with big blue eyes. She and two of her friends jumped into the back of a pickup truck being driven by one of the other kids. One minute she was standing there talking and laughing with me, the next she was standing in the bed of the pick-up doing sixty mile an hour donuts in the parking lot.”
What happened next changed everything about not only the remainder of the day, but Bellanti’s life forever. “I looked up just a second before the crash. I remember how horrible the sound of that truck hitting the other car was. The second car seemed to just break apart while the fifteen year old girl and the rest of pickup beds occupants were sent flying hundreds of feet through the air. I ran to the crash as fast as I could. When I got there I could see that it was bad, there was with screaming and blood everywhere. The girl that I was just speaking to was lying on her side. One of her arms was severed and blood was everywhere, it was just pumping out of her. The thing I remember the most was her eyes, and that only one of them was still in her head. I remember that I kept looking all over for her other eye.”
That was the day when Bellanti realized that more had to be done, and the day that he realized that “more had to be done by me.” Bellanti returned home to Massachusetts with a set of ideas, a mandate to try to show young people that drinking alcohol and driving can have horrific consequences. “It was easy to see that even with the plethora of programs available that lots of kids were being skipped over. I wanted to do something about that.” What he did was start what is now called Ground Control. “We have one mission, to educate teenagers and young adults about the dangers of driving drunk, to show them that they have choices. We show them that they can in fact choose life.”
Since its inception Ground Control has used a variety of programs to promote its message to Our Nation's young people. “We have to really work at keeping the attention of young people today.” But keeping people’s attention is exactly what Bellanti and Ground Control are doing. “We use concerts, music compilation CDs, speeches, school assemblies, and fashion shows to present our message. This year Bellanti and Ground Control are also producing a nationwide series of internet advertisements and will be sending them out directly to over 10 million people across the nation. Ground Control also will continue their highly successful drunk driving prevention compilation CD program. Titled Rockers for Life and Hip Hop for Life the CDs are a first of its kind national program designed to use local bands to promote the life saving message. Don’t drive drunk.
