We salute this year’s winners of our third annual Sweethearts of Safety Awards! 

Your dedication, leadership, and commitment to making travel across North Carolina safer for everyone truly embody the spirit of these awards. Well deserved!

Thank you as well to everyone who attended and made this year’s event a sold-out success. Together, we’re building safer roads for all.

Lastly, we extend a special thanks to this year’s sponsors. Your support of NCAST’s signature events strengthens our mission to save lives and reduce transportation-related crashes, injuries, and fatalities across North Carolina.

Ike Avery and Sarah Garner are members of the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys’ Traffic Safety Program, and they work with district attorneys across the state to prosecute impaired drivers by providing training and technical assistance. The award is named for its inaugural winner, Mark Ezzell, director of the North Carolina Governor’s Highway Safety Program, who shared these thoughts on this year’s winners:

“Ike’s steady, considered legal advice has been the last word on impaired driving law for decades. At both the Attorney General’s office and as the NC Conference of District Attorneys Traffic Safety Czar, he has advised governors, legislators, highway safety offices and others. He’s had his quiet fingerprints on some of NC’s most impactful impaired driving legislation of the past 30 years.

“Sarah Garner’s style is different from Ike’s, but with similar impact. She has personally trained thousands of law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges in North Carolina and beyond, with trademark high energy. I can’t go to a national conference without someone raving about how one of Sarah’s trainings impacted their professional career.”

Among their many efforts, these NC State Highway Patrol troopers give time each month to NCAST’s ‘Ask a Trooper’ feature in our Safe Travels NC newsletter, answering safe driving questions submitted by young people around the state.

Safe Passage brings together a wide range of groups to reduce wildlife–vehicle collisions and support safer driving conditions. The coalition finds common-sense, collaborative solutions to prevent animal strikes that are too often deadly, not just for deer, elk, bear and other animals, but for drivers and passengers.