A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (37 page)

Terryl confessed the “Twinkie incident” to Kaylene.

But she maintained that cell phone use was happening more and more, becoming a regular part of driving, and probably dangerous. And the consequences were entirely different, Terryl told Kaylene. That was the bottom line. Besides, she thought:
Spare me Reggie’s proverbial deathbed conversions and the last-minute apologies, in the face of jail time. This guy has stonewalled and lied.

And then there was a new affront.

Part of the plea agreement was that Reggie would give a media interview to Nadine Wimmer, the anchor for Channel 5 in Salt Lake City. But just a few days after Kaylene and Reggie met, Terryl got a call from the anchor.

“ ‘I can’t do this interview,’ ” Terryl says Nadine said.

“Why not?”

Nadine explained that Reggie’s lawyer had called and said that Reggie could be interviewed but would only talk about the risks of texting and driving, not about his experience in the accident.

Terryl was irate. Reggie would skate with a little jail time and community service, and then have his record wiped clean. Nothing good would come from this. Modest justice, and little learned.

CHAPTER 39

THE LAWMAKERS

O
N FRIDAY, THE THIRTEENTH
of February 2009, at 2:15 p.m., after a long week of legislating, the Utah House of Representatives met to discuss texting and driving. Ten of the twelve members of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Standing Committee convened in the capitol, the meeting called to order by their vice chairman, Curtis Oda, a Republican and insurance agent. They gathered in room 25, nothing fancy, more like city council chambers than a rotunda, the committee members in a horseshoe at the front, and a smattering of people in the two aisles of chairs looking on.

On the committee’s agenda were two proposed pieces of legislation restricting wireless phone use by drivers. One was from Representative Stephen Clark, the contractor from Provo. It called for a ban on texting while driving. The other, proposed by another Republican who was a finance professional, was slightly more aggressive than Clark’s in that it called for a ban on texting while driving as well as a requirement that drivers in a school zone use a hands-free device.

When it came time to take on the texting bills, Clark, friendly with a round face and round glasses, began by saying he would try to keep things brief “so you can move on it quickly.” He was being polite, the day was late, but this was going to be a fight. In the preceding days, he’d been pulling members of the committee aside in the caucus room to lobby them.

“We need to do something about this,” he told Representative Carl Wimmer, the policeman turned legislator. Wimmer recalls answering, “No, we don’t need to
do something
. That is the mantra of big government.”

Wimmer says that Clark asked him, “What will it take to make this work for you? What can I do to get your vote? What do I need to do to make this palatable?”

“My answer was: ‘Nothing. Nothing. I will not run this bill,’ ” says Wimmer.

Generally speaking, Wimmer was considered among the more conservative legislators, but not a total outlier. For him, being conservative meant supporting extremely limited government and states’ rights. To take an example, he wanted the state of Utah to withhold federal income tax paid by Utah residents until a state committee determined which federal programs were constitutional. Only then would it release the income tax money to the federal government to be spent on things it deemed constitutional (and not, he said, for unconstitutional things, like the Department of Education). On other issues, his view of states’ rights was gummier. For instance, he liked the federal Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage as being between a man and a woman, because he feared that, without it, some states would wind up pressured to allow gay marriage.

“I’m not one hundred percent consistent about everything,” he concedes.

Gregarious and happy to engage on any topic, Wimmer jumped right in during the hearing to express his concern about the proposed texting ban. He read from a law passed just a year earlier that made it a class A misdemeanor to drive carelessly for any number of reasons, including using a mobile phone.

“We’ve got twenty or thirty laws on the books that make it illegal to drive unsafe—you cannot speed, cannot drive left of the yellow line and right of the white line. You cannot wreck. You cannot follow closely,” he told his fellow legislators in a sum-up of his feelings on the subject. “One more [law] is not going to make a difference.”

Several other legislators responded by arguing that the point was to turn the ban against texting into its own offense. That way, it would send the message that texting was wrong and, more to the point, police wouldn’t have to wait until someone drove dangerously to pull them over.

“We would not sacrifice a child before we charge somebody,” said Representative Paul Ray, a Republican who was the legislator who had proposed the second, stricter, piece of legislation banning texting while driving.

A back-and-forth followed among a handful of the legislators. Most notable was an exchange between Clark and John Dougall, a Republican and electrical engineer and businessman who would later become Utah’s state auditor. He had short black hair and a question for Clark: Don’t you trust our citizens to make good decisions behind the wheel?

“I guess I do not,” Clark responded. Adding: “Like that guy this morning.” It was a reference to a story he’d told earlier in the hearing about some guy he’d seen texting while driving erratically.

At another point, Dougall pointed out that people are allowed to drink a bit and get behind the wheel but they’re not allowed to drink to the point of being drunk. What he was getting at was that people can be trusted to text a bit, to the point that they’re not a danger.

Nearly an hour and a half had passed, it was almost five p.m. The outlines of the conversation were clear: up with freedom and down with big government. There was still time for a few public comments.

A WOMAN, WHO SAID
she was the mother of six children and the grandmother to twenty-one, stood up. She described herself as just a citizen alarmed by the growing phenomenon of texting and driving. She said it wasn’t just teens, but moms and grandmas, which she realized when she talked about it with a group at a Christmas party a couple months back. “Everyone is doing it.”

The opposition came from two speakers. One was a representative of the Utah Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He wondered how police would be able to prove what someone was doing on their phone—texting, talking, emailing, what?—without being intrusive into the motorist’s personal business.

The other comment, the one that seemed to sum it all up, came from an insurance agent named Michael Tingey. He echoed Wimmer’s concern that this was just another law when there are plenty of laws on the books. But he really got a head of steam when discussing the comparison between drunk driving and texting while driving.

“The University of Utah study linking drunk driving or cell phone usage is patently ridiculous. It’s inaccurate, and I can prove it to you right now.”

The insurance man pointed out that way more people in Utah use cell phones than drive drunk, but challenged the committee members to think of how many fewer deaths they’d heard about from texting than drunk driving.

“I really reject and resent the fact that people are saying that cell phone usage and drunk driving are the same,” he said. “To try to equate them is simply wrong and everyone knows it.”

He said that what was happening was a good old-fashioned case of political correctness, the vilification of drivers and their cell phones. And he warned that “stampeding” to stem it could lead to unintended consequences. By way of example, he said that everyone talks about the number of children killed in school massacres, but said there had been fewer deaths from such shootings from 1996 to 2001 than there had been during that time caused by air bags deploying in cars and killing children.

“We didn’t get the public outcry over air bags,” he said. “Why? Because it’s politically correct to point at guns and say this is a terrible thing.”

Same thing, he said, with cell phones.

Dr. Strayer had been invited to speak to the legislature, but he was traveling. He’d testified in front of the legislature before, and he didn’t figure his voice would make all that big a contribution. He put the odds that this committee would pass on the legislation for a vote by the full house at “zero.”

And, on this day, he was right.

Shortly after Tingey, the insurance man, concluded, the committee took up a vote. There was a motion to pass Clark’s bill out of committee, but it wasn’t seconded. A motion was passed to move on to the next item of business.

This legislation seemed headed for the cutting-room floor.

CHAPTER 40

THE LAWMAKERS

D
OUGLAS AAGARD WAS IN
a hurry. The chair of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Standing Committee was staring down seven agenda items on another Friday afternoon. Of the twelve members of the committee, five were elsewhere, flogging some or another piece of legislation. And Representative Clark, the sponsor of the texting ban, which he’d gotten on the agenda for a final airing, wasn’t anywhere to be found.

So the Chair moved to the next agenda item. It was sponsored by Wimmer. It was a proposal to extend the statute of limitations on environmental crimes. “Believe it or not, this is a pro-environmental bill,” Wimmer began, eliciting a chuckle. It passed unanimously out of committee.

Clark still hadn’t returned. Someone suggested that, in his absence, Aagard allow a few more comments from the audience on the texting bill, H.B. 290, officially: The prohibition of Wireless Communication Device Use in a Motor Vehicle.

Aagard thought that made sense—the place was packed for this hearing—but in asking for comment, he offered a preface: “Bear in mind, we’ve pretty much heard this bill last time so unless you’ve got something to add . . .” In other words, we’ve seen how this plays out, so let’s get it over with and move on to something that this committee intends to pass; let’s quickly move past this last-ditch effort by Clark.

“We need you to identify who you are and who you’re with.”

A petite blond woman walked to the front. She had a piece of paper in her hand.

“My name is Terryl Warner. I’m with the Cache County Attorney’s Office in Logan.” She wore a black dress with a forest-green blazer over it.

“In July of 2008, a woman in Salt Lake City ran a red light while trying to send a text message. She critically injured one driver and killed a pedestrian,” Terryl launched in. Her voice came across rapid-fire, bouncing, like a rabbit dashing across a warren. She recited some of the research she’d been compiling. “Weeks later, a train operator texting while on the job killed twenty-six people and injured nearly one hundred and fifty. In March of 2007, seventeen-year-old Lauren Mulkey was killed when a texting driver ran a red light. Several months later, five cheerleaders were celebrating after their graduation and they were killed when the driver was texting. In September of 2006, two rocket scientists were killed when a text-messaging driver crossed the center line and struck their vehicle. Several months later, two football players in Cache County were killed when the driver was trying to send a text message and drove into oncoming traffic.” (In fact, Terryl says she was relying on a law enforcement tip that the driver was sending a text message, something that was never proven. Similarly, Terryl had heard widely circulated allegations that the driver who killed Lauren Mulkey was on the phone at the time of the wreck, but that was never proven in court, and the driver pleaded guilty to negligent homicide.)

Quite obviously, Terryl was trying to counter criticism that texting and driving was merely a theoretical problem, and that it was fair to compare it to such problems as drinking and driving.

“According to our office,” Terryl said, putting a fine point on it, “we have not had a DUI homicide since 2001. But in the past two and a half years, we’ve had four deaths due to text messaging.”

Terryl listed a few more stats, including research from the state of Utah that the number-one cause of distraction-related wrecks in the state owed to cell phone use by motorists. She cited some of Dr. Strayer’s research. The committee seemed interested enough, but this was, in a way, more of the same. Each side had their advocates.

Terryl noticed a few legislators were texting, including Wimmer.

Terryl concluded: “I have read we should concentrate on DUIs, that we shouldn’t regulate what people do in their cars, and that business people should be able to conduct business while in their vehicles. Those thoughts are unacceptable knowing how dangerous a text-messaging driver is.”

She sat.

UP STOOD A YOUNG
woman, Paula Hernandez, a high school student, who spoke only for around a minute, saying that texting and driving could be dangerous and the law should “take that privilege away.”

Committee members thanked her for her courage, ready to move on. Terryl noticed that, while she was testifying and even before it, the committee members had seemed to be only half listening; a couple, she noticed, were even texting, playing with their phones.

“Anyone else from the audience?” Aagard asked.

A YOUNG MAN STOOD
up.

“Sir, please come forward.”

The young man walked to the front. He had a contradictory physical presence, taking up space, a decent-sized kid, but hollowed out. Slumped from the inside. He wore a dark suit and a tie.

“Again, if you can state your name and who you’re with.”

“My name is Reggie Shaw and I am a citizen.”

Up until this point, the most the quiet young man had said about the accident and his feelings was to the probation officer, Kaylene Yonk. He paused, and looked up.