“I remember her face, deathly white under the torch. She had unsurvivable injuries and I watched the last of her life ebb away.”

Those were the words of Thames Valley paramedic Adey Varley who told Oxfordshire teenagers this week how he tried to resuscitate a 16-year-old who’d had been flung from a car into a bush and died in his arms.

It was part of the police’s hard-hitting Safe Drive Stay Alive road safety production at the King’s Centre in Osney Mead, Oxford, which aims to remind young drivers to slow down on the roads.

Sixth formers from across the county were shown a film featuring four friends involved in a fatal crash.

Representatives from the police, ambulance, fire service and John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford then stepped on stage to explain their roles and experiences.

At the end of the production, 27-year-old Shelley Halsey, from Milton Keynes, told the audience how she only left the John Radcliffe in March this year following a horrific car crash in March 2007.

The smash left her in a coma for two months and permanently brain damaged.

Firefighter Jo Cleary spoke about the day she cut 19-year-old South Moreton teenager Shane Vaughan from a car on Christmas Day in 2006. He did not survive the crash.

She said: “Every time I drive past the place where someone has died I say my own little prayer for a person I will never forget.”

Pc Kelly Hobson, from the Aylesbury road death investigation team, said telling parents their child has died makes her feel physically sick. She told the teenagers: “Please speak up and tell the driver to slow down. Please drive safely and stay alive.”

By the end of the two week campaign, 14,000 young adults across three counties will have seen the film.

Louise House, 17, a pupil at Gosford Hill School in Kidlington, said: “It makes you see how fragile life is.

“Doing small things like putting a seat belt on can save lives and also taking responsibility for your own safety and telling a driver to slow down.”