MAN ON A MISSION

On one of spring's first warm-weather days, a Don's Frozen Lemonade truck drives into a quiet neighborhood off Lonsdale Avenue in Lincoln.

Scott Briggs, carrying a videocamera, spots the truck and approaches. "There's a new lemonade guy in the area," he narrates as he films.

Briggs walks closer, apologizing to a man buying ice cream for his child. "You have to excuse me," he says, speaking over the tinkling tones of Yankee Doodle Dandy. "These guys are operating illegally without their safety lights on, so that's why I'm taping."

As Briggs approaches the driver, his voice escalates in volume and pitch.

"Hey, do you know you need your safety lights on when you serve the public on the street?"

"Do I know that?" the driver responds. "It depends on where you're at."

"What's your name?" Briggs asks.

"Donald William Klemanchuck," the driver answers.

"Is this your business?"

"Yes, it is, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you today? Would you like to buy any ice cream?"

"No. The Lincoln police will be pulling you over."

"OK, good."

"You think it's a joke, huh? My daughter was almost killed last May . . ."

"Do I think ..." Klemanchuck starts to say, but Briggs won't let him finish. By now he's shouting:

"You stay out of this neighborhood ..."

Briggs turns off the camera. He continues to shout and pound on the truck's window.

A Lincoln police officer, driving by, hears the noise, sees the disruption, and stops. The officer arrests Briggs, charging him with disorderly conduct.

THE ARREST BROUGHT to an abrupt end Briggs' one-man crusade against lemonade trucks, a crusade he had launched a year ago after his 14-year-old daughter, Samantha, was hit by a car as she tried to cross Lonsdale Avenue, clutching a frozen lemonade.

Samantha bounced off the car's hood and landed on the pavement, her skull fractured, her brain badly injured.

The car's driver, Pamela J. Brown, told the police that as she was passing the lemonade truck she saw a girl running out from in front of the truck. She said she tried to stop but hit the child.

The truck, the police noted, was parked with its right tires on the shoulder, with most of the vehicle in the northbound travel lane.

Nikolin Lucaj, the driver of the Domenic's Frozen Lemonade truck, told the police he sold Samantha a drink and was working in the back of the truck when he heard a crash.

JUST BEFORE THE ACCIDENT, Samantha was at a friend's house, watching the movie 8 Mile. It was 4 p.m., May 5, 2003. The two girls went outside, where the neighborhood boys were playing basketball.

Lucaj told the police he was driving the lemonade truck on Lonsdale Avenue, a busy thoroughfare that cuts briefly through southern Lincoln on its way from Central Falls to Cumberland, when he saw Samantha motioning for him to stop.

Instead of turning left onto a residential side street, the truck stopped on Lonsdale Avenue, with its service window facing the guardrail and dense woods.

Samantha crossed the two-lane street and bought a slushy. She doesn't remember anything more.

Alerted by a neighbor, Scott Briggs dashed out of the house wearing no shirt, no shoes -- just a pair of shorts. He saw his daughter lying in the street.

He thought she was dead.

One neighbor called the police. Another reached Samantha's mother, Denise, on her cell phone in her car. "Wait right there. I'll come get you," was all the neighbor would say.

Denise pulled her car to the side of the road in Cumberland and sat there for 40 minutes, while the neighbor negotiated late-afternoon roadways clogged with commuters. "It seemed like days," Denise remembers. "I was tearing my hair out."

Scott went with the ambulance to Hasbro Children's Hospital, in Providence. Denise met them there.

Samantha was in a coma, in critical condition.

Scott and Denise aren't sure how they got through the next few weeks of sleepless nights at their daughter's bedside.

"I said to God - you are not taking her away," Denise says.

OVER THE NEXT FOUR WEEKS, as the swelling in her brain went down, Samantha gradually emerged from the coma.

Scott returned to running his company, Olympia Adhesives, in Norwood, Mass. Denise moved her karaoke business to their home.

But everything else in the Briggs' family's life seemed to be going wrong.

The day Samantha was transferred from Hasbro to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, Scott got into a car accident, ruining plans to be there when his daughter arrived at the unfamiliar hospital.

Two months later, in late July, the family bumped up against the coverage limits of their insurance with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. A week passed while it was being determined whether insurance would cover a longer stay at the rehabilitation hospital. The answer was no.

Spaulding sent the family a bill for that week. It cost $68,000.

Then, the state denied Samantha disability payments.

It turned out Pamela Brown's car wasn't registered or insured.Though the state requires motorists to carry at least $25,000 in bodily injury coverage, there would be no check for Samantha.

Instead, her family gets bill-collection notices.

AS SAMANTHA'S HEALTH IMPROVED, Scott Briggs mounted an impromptu campaign to persuade Rhode Island's ice-cream and lemonade truck drivers to use their flashing safety lights. He took his videocamera to the streets of Central Falls, Pawtucket and Lincoln, filming the conspicuous absence of flashing lights and the drivers' reactions when he asked them to turn on the lights, as required by state law.

On the video, the camera zooms in on each truck's registration plate. It pans to the "Caution -- Children" lettering, then to the safety lights, which most definitely are not blinking.

When he talks to the drivers, the speech is the same each time.

"Are you aware you're supposed to have your safety lights on when you're serving the public? Your flashing safety lights? Do you want to put them on, please? My daughter was almost killed because a lemonade truck driver didn't use his safety lights."

Some drivers respond politely, asking about the safety lights and expressing surprise. Some are belligerent. One shields his face. Another pulls out a camera and photographs Briggs.

Since the shouting match that got him arrested, Briggs no longer goes near ice-cream trucks. It's probably better that way. When Briggs sees a truck now without its flashers on, he says, "I start to feel like I want to tip the truck over."

THE UPPER RIGHT QUARTER of Samantha's skull was still missing when she came home from the hospital. Just skin protected that part of her brain, like a baby's soft spot, but bigger.

For three months, Samantha wore a white helmet everywhere. As an added precaution, Denise wrapped a thick layer of towels around the banister at the bottom of the stairs. She even put bells on the doors to alert them if Samantha wandered out while no one was looking.

For awhile, her parents made Samantha sleep on the living room couch rather than take the chance of having her upstairs. Her father pulled out a cushion and slept next to her.

In late October, doctors restored the piece of skull that had been frozen at Hasbro since the accident nearly seven months earlier. She came home on Halloween. That night, she dressed up as a surgeon and went trick-or-treating.

THE LINCOLN POLICE cited Lucaj, the truck driver, with two traffic violations: stopping on the travel portion of an open highway where prohibited, and failure to operate the required safety lights on a food vending vehicle.

Lucaj contested both citations. On July 17, 2003, Traffic Court Judge Albert R. Ciullo found him guilty of failing to use safety lights. He dismissed the other charge, saying that a vehicle is only prohibited from stopping on the travel portion of a highway if that road is "outside of a business or residence district." Because there are businesses and homes on Lonsdale Avenue, the judge found it was not illegal for the truck to stop there.

Lucaj appealed the safety light violation and lost.

Pamela Brown, the driver of the car, failed to appear in court in June 2003 and was found guilty in absentia of driving an unregistered vehicle. Last month, she pleaded guilty to driving without insurance.

Lucaj paid a $75 fine, plus $25 court costs.

Scott Briggs paid almost as much -- $92.50 -- for his disorderly conduct charge.

Brown had her driver's license suspended for two months and was fined $350.

SCOTT AND DENISE BRIGGS hope Samantha's accident will serve as a catalyst for the adoption of stronger safety requirements for ice-cream trucks. They are hoping legislators will learn about Samantha's accident and take up their cause at the State House.

"I think one of the things that would work really well is going from charging $75 per violation to $750 per violation," Denise says.

By way of comparison, the owner of a school bus company can be fined $500 a day if he has a driver operating without the appropriate license and certification. And, motorists who don't stop for school buses with flashing lights activated can be fined up to $300 on a first offense. On a second or subsequent offense, the $300 fine is mandatory, and a fine up to $500 can be lodged.

Rhode Island state law contains very little that explicitly regulates ice-cream trucks.

While anyone with a license to drive a passenger car can operate an ice-cream truck, those who drive school buses must get a commercial driver's license with a special certificate, must be 21 years old, have a good driving record and must complete a 10-hour training course, pass a written examination, and pass a driving test in a bus.

The law gives the Division of Motor Vehicles the right to set standards governing "character, competency and fitness" of school-bus drivers.

Some communities -- including Central Falls and Pawtucket -- conduct background checks as a condition of the license to sell ice cream. Providence has police officers who perform background checks on city licensees, including the 300 peddlers' licenses the city approves annually.

Many communities, including Woonsocket, Cumberland, North Providence and Lincoln, perform no such checks.

Given the amount of interaction ice-cream truck drivers have with children, Scott and Denise Briggs wonder why the laws are so much less strict for these trucks than they are for school buses.

"Kids are drawn to these things like moths to a flame," Denise says.

Rod Florez, the manager of Palagi's Ice Cream, says he would welcome stricter regulations. He says he already takes many precautions not required by law.

Palagi's operates 20 trucks in eight communities, including 2 trucks in Lincoln. Florez says, for example, he checks each driver's criminal background and driving history, regardless of whether a driver's route goes into a community that requires it.

"I don't want child molesters with us," Florez says.

Palagi's employs two mechanics who, he says, inspect each truck, each morning, checking lights, tires and fluid levels.

A Palagi's manager rides along for a driver's first two days on the job, assessing driving skills, telling the driver where to stop and where not to stop, and noticing how the driver interacts with customers.

He put mobile arms reading "Slow -- Children" on two of his trucks, on a trial basis, and plans to put them on all his trucks.

But even if the state passed a law requiring traffic to stop for ice-cream trucks, Florez says he's not optimistic it would work. He used to drive school buses and, he says, drivers would zoom right past school buses stopped to load or unload.

"If they don't stop for a school bus," he asks, "why would they stop for an ice-cream truck?"

A YEAR AGO, while Samantha's friends were entering eighth grade at Lincoln Middle School, Samantha entered the neuro-rehabilitation program at Sargent Rehabilitation Center, in Warwick. The Lincoln School Department pays Sargent $50,000 a year for Samantha's education there, and also provides transportation to and from Warwick each day.

By the time Samantha started at Sargent, she'd recovered her speech and eyesight, but academically, she was functioning two years below grade level. She had poor balance, poor gait pattern and weak muscles. She spent her days in individual physical therapy, practicing basic tasks such as getting into and out of bed without getting hurt.

In May, Samantha reentered Lincoln Middle School, attending eighth grade one day a week and Sargent the other four. For the summer, she attended Sargent five days a week.

She is now functioning close to her grade level. She's reading novels and doing algebra. She's working on higher-order thinking skills -- she writes poems and essays for the Sargent newsletter -- and practices attention skills in distractible environments such as group work. In "lunch group," students and staff simply go out to a restaurant for lunch and practice monitoring the volume of their own voices, waiting their turn to speak and to order.

"After a brain injury, nothing can be taken for granted," says Colleen McCarthy, director of Sargent's brain-injury rehabilitation program.

On a Tuesday morning in June, the lesson is baking apple-cinnamon cake. Samantha, a cute, bouncy 15-year-old with brown eyes that snap, sprays a pan's sides with vegetable-oil spray and examines the side of the box, pointing with a plastic-gloved finger.

She sports a jaunty short haircut, almost always covered by a newsboy cap in the style made trendy by Britney Spears. Though her last operation was months ago, and her hair has grown in to cover the scar, she's still not comfortable taking the hat off.

Gradually, Samantha will increase the number of days per week she attends Lincoln High School as a ninth grader, with the goal of going there full-time by the end of the school year.

One would expect a 15-year-old would be dying to live the life of a regular kid, going to high school with her friends.

But Samantha is patient. "I understand the circumstances and everything," she says. "As long as I get to full time eventually, everything's fine."

By spring, the doctors say, she may be able to get her learner's permit and start driving.

IT'S 4:30 P.M., and in the Briggs backyard, there's chicken on the grill. Samantha drinks a cherry slushy, purchased earlier from a fast-food restaurant. In the living room, Donna, a family friend who's practically moved in since the accident, folds laundry.

There's a flash of yellow in the window, almost too quick to see. Scott rushes to a window. Denise, her mother, darts out the back door.

A Palagi's truck has just driven by.

Samantha's 9-year-old sister Melody and a friend are sitting on the porch of the house across the street.

"You kids didn't buy ice cream off him, did you?" Denise asks them, even though they aren't holding any ice cream.

Later, after dinner, Samantha chats quietly on the phone with Frankie, her boyfriend.

Scott sits on the back steps, staring at the swimming pool, which has turned green despite his best efforts to keep it clear. An inflatable plastic Nemo fish floats in the pool.

Suddenly Samantha bursts into the kitchen, yelling and stomping and nearly in tears. Frankie is grounded, and Samantha has just had a fight with his sister on the phone.

Eventually, Denise coaxes her to go upstairs and cool off.

Ups and downs are part of being 15. But the brain injury makes it much harder for Samantha to control them.

"There's not a day that goes by without some stress," Scott observes through the screen door.

After a few minutes, Samantha comes downstairs and, calmer now, gives her mother a hug.

In some ways Samantha is a typical rebellious teenager. Denise let her get a third hole in each ear, in exchange for Samantha's promise not to ask for any other piercings -- nose, lip, eyebrow, belly button, etc.

The scar on her stomach, a deep, round indentation an inch in diameter, sets her apart from her friends. That's where doctors inserted a feeding tube into her stomach to give her body the caloric intake it needed to heal. Samantha isn't embarrassed by the scar, displaying it with a mixture of modesty and pride.

Before the accident, Samantha had long hair. She used to do cheerleading and gymnastics. She choreographed routines for younger cheerleaders. In l995 she turned 138 cartwheels in five minutes. She still has the trophy.

When asked if she'll get back into sports, she shrugs.

Some of her old friends don't hang out with her anymore, she says matter-of-factly. It makes her sad, but she's made new friends at Sargent.

Samantha has turned to poetry as an outlet for her emotions.

The neighborhood where the Briggs family lives is familial and working-class, a grid of four hemmed-in streets whose only outlet is Lonsdale Avenue. In the evening, parents sit in lawn chairs in their front yards, watching the children playing in the streets.

Scott and Denise want to move from the cozy white house they bought 15 years ago. Every time they leave home, and every time they return, they see the spot where Scott found Samantha lying in the road. For more than a year, yellow paint marked the guardrail, sprayed to line up with the lemonade truck's front and back end for accident reconstruction. Red paint still shows where their daughter's head came to rest. They see it every day, and they remember.

As Scott points out the accident scene, he recounts how the ice-cream truck driver told the police he didn't see the accident because he'd gone into the back of the truck to put the money away. He didn't even watch to make sure Samantha got safely across the street, Scott says.

"That's irrelevant," Denise says. "He never should have stopped there in the first place."

Scott disagrees and snaps at her.

Still angry, they take their emotions out on each other, even when they don't mean to. But the bitterness evaporates as quickly as it sprang up.

They've been through it all together, confronting a parent's worst fear when they came close to losing a child, then savoring each small victory as their daughter recovered. Now, they're united by the quest to prevent the same thing, or worse, from happening to someone else's child.

"I wouldn't wish this on anyone," Denise says. Tears overpower her voice. She composes herself. "It would help me to know that I'd done one thing to help."