Heartbroken mum’s plea to drivers months after daughter’s ‘totally preventable’ death

Nine months after her 17-year-old daughter died in a crash, Kellie Postle has revealed her daughter’s final text as she bounded out the door to join her friends.

“Should be home by 8.30pm, XX”.

It was the end of a message Kellie Postle received from her 17-year-old daughter Alyssa just after she bounded excitedly out the door to join friends for dinner on August 11 last year.

Within an hour of the text, as the family finished their Friday night dinner, Ms Postle opened the door to two distressed teenagers.

“They came in and said there’s been an accident, you need to go to the hospital,” Ms Postle said.

“I think I fell to my knees.”

Alyssa Postle, 17, died in August last year. She was in Year 12 and had just 100 days left of school. Picture: Facebook

In the chaotic moments that followed Alyssa’s family learnt that the Year 12 student had been a passenger in her friend’s car when it crashed into a power pole outside Bray Park State High School.

She was critically injured and died three days later after her family mustered the strength to turn off her life support.

The juvenile driver was charged with dangerous operation of a vehicle causing death and will be dealt with under the Youth Justice Act.

Nine months on from the crash, Ms Postle sits in the living room where photographs of her grinning daughter beam from pictures on their TV unit.

Bray Park mum Kellie Postle sits in Alyssa’s bedroom. Picture: Tara Croser.

She laughs in between tears as she recalls her quirky teenager who was never afraid to be “a little bit of a dag”.

“She loved wearing her school tracksuit pants and bucket hats, bucket hats were a big thing,” she said.

“She’d just do random things, doing the dishes all the time with (her brother) Ad, always doing a TikTok or dancing or doing something silly.”

Ms Postle has bravely spoken to The Courier-Mail about the domino effect road trauma has had on her family to help raise awareness in the lead-up to Fatality Free Friday on May 28.

She urged drivers to take responsibility for the safety of everyone on the road.

“This is preventable,” Ms Postle said.

Alyssa Postle at a Little Athletics meet in 2017.

“It’s not like cancer, it’s in our hands, we can control it if every single one of us did the right thing, this wouldn’t be happening.”

New research released by The Australian Road Safety Foundation suggests that Australia’s cavalier attitude to road safety could be responsible for countless unnecessary deaths.

More than 1100 people lost their lives on Australia’s road in 2020, with Queensland recording 278 fatalities – the second highest road toll of all states and territories.

The organisation’s founding CEO Russell White said 90 per cent of Queensland road users incorrectly believed that drivers make up the majority of the road toll.

“In actual fact more than half are passengers, pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists,” he said.

In the lead-up to Fatality Free Friday on May 28, Mr White encouraged all road users to take the pledge to Choose Road Safety.