Lie Down in Darkness

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Except for Michael Shingledecker's friends and family, everybody seemed to know exactly how to interpret the 18-year-old's death last week. The reason was timing. He was killed just as the debate was heating up once more about pop culture's effect on young people and raising some old questions: Just how vulnerable, how suggestible, are these young consumers? Will they parrot anything they see done on a screen? And if so, who's responsible?

Shingledecker's death was easy to portray as a clear-cut case of cause and effect. On Oct. 10, he and three carloads of friends saw the movie The Program at a drive-in theater not far from his home in rural Stoneboro, Pennsylvania. Early in the film, its hero, a college quarterback, tries to prove grace under pressure by lying down in the middle of a busy highway flipping through a magazine as the trucks swerve to avoid him. He goes unscathed. Shingledecker did not seem especially moved by the film, his girlfriend reports. But the next weekend, he tried the same stunt himself on the double yellow line in the middle of Pennsylvania Route 62 -- and was hit by a pickup truck.

Almost immediately his fate was appropriated by columnists and talk-show hosts, who compared Shingledecker with the five-year-old alleged to have been under the influence of MTV's Beavis and Butt-head cartoon when he started a fatal fire. And on Capitol Hill, Shingledecker haunted a long-scheduled Commerce Committee hearing on screen violence, where Attorney General Janet Reno took off after a brace of entertainment executives.

In rural Polk, 80 miles north of Pittsburgh, people had more trouble making sense of the tragedy -- not just because they were closer to Shingledecker, but because some realized that for at least two years, without the benefit of any cinematic model, Venango County youths have been lying down in the middle of the street, daring the cars to come.

"I've done it," says Lona Mott, a ninth-grader at Franklin Area High School, from which Shingledecker graduated last spring. On Halloween two years ago, she recalls, she and 20 other kids took turns arranging themselves like sardines across a road. When they saw headlights, most bolted, but a few stayed pat. Says Mott: "All my friends were doing it, so I did it. I wasn't even thinking of getting hit."

Adults are reduced to hazarding standard, sad guesses about what motivates these daredevils. "They're probably bored," says local psychologist Robert Craig. "It's cold and rains a lot. It's not the most exciting place to be if you're a teenager." Mimi Mahon, a nursing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, offers the truism that "kids believe they are impervious to injury." Patricia Shingledecker, Michael's mother, suggests helplessly, "All people somewhere are looking for a thrill."

Most disturbing for parents is that Michael seemed a perfectly normal teen. He was no self-destructive brooder -- "a bouncy, real nice guy," remembers Cathy Willis, the high schools student-activities coordinator. College-bound, a pole-vaulter who also subbed on the basketball team, he had little to prove. He rode horses, hunted and took part in adult-supervised "demolition derby" auto races, but was hardly a risk addict. Nor was peer pressure a problem, says his girlfriend Raina Hedglin: "I don't know anyone who could influence him." At his funeral, friends and family buried a large jar of Jif peanut butter and a pack of instant pudding with him; they were his favorite foods. Hedglin dropped in a napkin she had saved from their prom.

Any crusade planned around him might focus as appropriately on alcohol as on movies. State police say that evening he and his friend Dean Bartlett (who suffered substantial injuries but will survive) had consumed enough beer to "impair their mental functioning." But laws on that exist already -- the police are searching for whoever sold liquor to two teenagers in a state where the drinking age is 21.

In the meantime, Shingledecker's death contributed to the extraordinary Senate hearing on Wednesday at which Reno delivered a straightforward threat: if the television industry didn't do something to curb violence in its programs by year's end, she said, government regulation would be "imperative." Some media executives suggested that the Attorney General might be on shaky constitutional ground with her attack. But many nonetheless felt compelled to point the finger at their competitors. And in Hollywood the company behind The Program, Disney's Touchstone Pictures division, announced that it was shipping new prints of The Program without the offending scene.

That gesture may make little difference in Venango County, where two more youths attempted the roadway stunt on Wednesday -- one a fourth-grader, the other a first-grader. And it will complicate things for Patricia Shingledecker. She vows to go and see the movie, including the highway scene. "I want to see what prompted them," she says. "Everyone says Michael and I were a lot alike. If I see it, I think I could understand better." If the movie does enlighten her, then she will have achieved an answer that so far seems to elude the nation.

With reporting by Wendy Cole/Polk, with other bureaus