Joshua Jahn was still grief-stricken – his wife and children had been killed only a few months earlier – when he was first asked to speak in 2009. He was “quite nervous” about recounting the tragedy.

Jahn swallowed hard, stood before a group of high school students and let it out. On Nov. 6, 2008, a drunk driver collided with his wife’s car on Route 47 and Gardner Road, south of Morris. The crash killed Jahn’s 27-year-old wife, Mandy, and their two children. Ryan was not yet 4. Kaitlyn was nine days short of her first birthday.

Jahn had never done any public speaking before, but his lack of experience proved no obstacle before his test audience in Dwight. It was a terrible story, but a powerful one. He held the room.

“I felt like I got to introduce my family to people that had never actually met them,” Jahn said. “And I know it’s a big part of my healing process – being able to give something back and leave something behind. My family’s not physically here anymore. But I know that they’ve impacted so many other people’s lives.

“And after that, I was kind of invigorated to do that more,” Jahn said. “In the middle of 2009, I started to get asked to do some speaking at victim impact panels.”

Drunk drivers are prosecuted and then heavily penalized when convicted. They also are required to sit for presentations by men and women who’ve lost loved ones in alcohol-related crashes. Jahn eagerly joined a group of bereaved speakers and he’s been a regular in Grundy and La Salle counties.

Kara McConville, victim-witness coordinator for the La Salle County State’s Attorney’s Office, said Jahn has produced an electric reaction from participants – most of whom are court-ordered to attend and disinclined to listen.

“People have to excuse themselves sometimes because it’s such a deeply moving story,” McConville said. “They have a visceral reaction to him and will sometimes stick around afterwards to share their own stories with him.”

His story resonates in part because the details were so shocking. The at-fault driver blew through a stop sign and broadsided Mandy and the children at 68 mph. The impact ejected the kids out of their car seats and the vehicle.

The accident and ensuing court case made headlines across Illinois. Notably, the driver has not yet completed her prison sentence. Ann Marie Getz, now 60, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for the fatal crash. She’s scheduled for parole in spring 2029.

Jahn proved to be a natural speaker and, with experience, he’s learned how to reach some of the harder cases. It’s not uncommon for him to walk into the room and find his court-ordered listeners with their arms folded, gazing at the ceiling, quite ready to tune him out. Far from getting frustrated, Jahn rises to the challenge.

“You just kind of develop a calm because after you see that so much, you kind of learn to see behind it,” he said. “A lot of times, I can kind of sense, by looking at the crowd, who needs to hear it the most.

“I’ve had some pretty humbling experiences where the roughest guy in the room will come up to me after as everybody’s walking out and he’ll be the guy that’s in tears. He’ll be the guy who wants to shake my hand. I found that it’s very important to connect to those people and always ask them their names and to let them tell me a little bit about themselves.”

It’s a measure of his success that he’s been contacted by listeners years after the fact. He’s been approached by adult men and women who remembered Jahn speaking at their high schools and who still vividly recall his story.

“They’ve even named their own kids after Ryan and Kaitlyn,” he said.