Page 95 - Abilene Living

It’s a pain no parent who has not lived through it can fathom - losing a child. That’s what Matt Robinson will tell you, even fve years after the fact. “It never goes away,” he said. “You learn how to deal with it day- to-day.” One way Robinson has learned to deal with the pain is to offer his experience as an aid to others.

Robinson’s son, Zach, played baseball, basketball and soccer. He was on the varsity golf team and a member of the concert choir while at Cooper High School. He was one of two young men killed in an accident October 1, 2006. Zach and a friend were fatally injured when the driver of a truck they were riding in slammed into a tree off Winters Freeway in Abilene. All three had been drinking. All were underage.

Today, Robinson speaks about the dangers of drunken driving. But the Abilene electrical contractor was not always so accommodating. He had some personal healing to do. “About six months after the accident, a youth minister kept calling me and encouraging me to do this for his youth group,” Robinson said. “I thought,

‘There’s no way in the world I could do that.’ But I decided if maybe I could do this I could keep this from happening to anyone else. So I share the story that happened to us and how it’s affected our entire family, not only our family, but our nephews and nieces and his friends.” He recalls the frst time he shared his story. He spoke to a group of young people at the site of the crash. “Oh my gosh, I actually talked at the tree where he died,” Robinson said. “I think about that one every time I talk. I met a youth group right where he died. He went off the highway, traveled more than 500 feet, hit a tree at eighty-four mph and never hit the brakes. Right where he died, that’s where I talked to them.”

That was a few years ago. Traffc makes it diffcult to safely speak to groups there, so he visits churches, schools and civic clubs with his message. “Really, I speak to anyone,” he said.