A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (47 page)

Part of my curiosity was also personal. I was watching how technology was altering my own behavior. I could see that I was spending a lot of time with media, changing my communications patterns, feeling a tick of anxiety when away from my device, using it to escape from uncomfortable moments or boredom, even when behind the wheel. It wasn’t so much that I saw this technology as bad or good, but simply as powerful.

In 2003, I’d written a piece for the Sunday business section called “The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?” I started the story with a venture capitalist who was sitting at a conference he’d paid $2,000 to attend, but he said he wasn’t paying attention at all to the goings on because he was simultaneously on his laptop and his phone. “It’s hard to concentrate on one thing,” he said in the story. “I think I have a condition.”

I was also observing, professionally and personally, the extraordinary power of technology, as a productivity tool and a tool for liberation and creativity. Thanks to technology, I didn’t have to work in New York, but could be in San Francisco, which allowed me to write about Silicon Valley, be immersed in it. I could talk to my editors daily, hourly, whenever, and file my stories from my home office or on the go. I once wrote a front-page story about the legal arguments made in a lawsuit against Napster, the music-file-sharing company, while sitting on the floor outside the courtroom on the Ninth Circuit in downtown San Francisco, and then called the story in to my editors by cell phone.

I discovered that technology, by providing such flexibility, could make me not just more efficient but, in a way, more creative. I could work when and if the muse hit. I could also take breaks more easily, say, jet off to the gym during lunch, and take my phone to make sure I wasn’t missing something. At the time, I didn’t realize how much more effective that could make me, but something visceral spoke to me about the power to have more control over my life.

This piece, this liberation, was its own mixed blessing. I wasn’t putting so fine a point on it at the time, but I was beginning to wrestle in my own life with questions of efficiency and opportunity. So what if we could do more work? So what if we could stay in touch all the time? Should we? It was thinking that would evolve in no small part thanks to my interactions with Reggie.

At the time, back before I met him, these conflicting forces helped fuel and indulge a muse that bowled me over in 2004. I wrote a novel called
Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions
, that posited about the addictive powers of technology and whether it might change our realities and perceptions. It was more science fiction than science, but I did borrow from some of the fledgling science I’d discovered in the story I wrote for the paper a year earlier. Technology was the culprit in the book, and no small companion and collaborator in helping me write and then publicize the book.

WHEN ADAM AND I
started talking in December 2008, we decided I’d start looking into what Adam calls a “smart dumb question” regarding one particular issue: Why are people using their phones while driving? Isn’t that dangerous? Shouldn’t they know better?

The following spring, I started reporting the story as I took on other daily assignments. It was something of a right of passage for me as a reporter to be asked to look into something in some depth, to be allowed the time to investigate something that might not bear fruit. I took my time, and I learned a lot.

I made a trip to Utah and spent time meeting with Dr. Strayer, who’d clearly distinguished himself as a leader in the field. While there, I also talked to the family of Lauren Mulkey, the young woman who was seventeen years old when she’d gone out with friends for Saint Patrick’s Day and got killed by a distracted driver. When I returned from that reporting trip, I sent a memo to Adam that explained much of Dr. Strayer’s research, and that summarized other things I’d discovered, like the growing research on texting (not just in Dr. Strayer’s lab but at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute), and I wrote to him about what seemed like a somewhat startling discovery: allegations that the federal government had known about the risks of using a phone while driving well back around 2000 and had essentially buried that information for political reasons.

My memo proposed we write a story “that weaves one very human tale of a fatal accident along with the emerging science and, pointedly: the evidence that the government has been slow to release clear evidence of dangers of cell phones in cars. In fact, I can almost see a parallel structure in this story: our protagonists not paying attention to the road while the government is not paying attention to the evidence.”

As my reporting continued, I found other stories—tragic, terrible tales. One of them was the story of Linda Doyle, who, in September 2008, had been driving in Oklahoma City, not far from her house, when she was killed by another motorist, Christopher Hill. Hill had been talking on his phone and had run a red light at high speeds.

On July 19, 2009, the paper ran on its front page a long, ambitious narrative that weaved the collision of Hill and Doyle into a story about the science, politics, and policy around distracted driving. It was so ambitious because we thought this was it, one story aimed at putting a stamp on this issue. Underscoring how much we invested in that story was an added element of presentation: The
New York Times
produced a video game, a sort of driving simulator, that people could play to test their own abilities to multitask.

We thought the article might have legs, but we were blown away by what happened. The story just took off. It got picked up by lots of media, and was viewed and emailed in big numbers on the
New York Times
website. It received 655 comments, which, within even a year, would not seem such a big deal, but at the time it was astronomical. People were talking about how the story got at something that they were feeling and experiencing acutely in their own lives.

Because I’d invested so much in reporting in the prior six months, I had a lot of other story ideas in my notebook. We went with the momentum. On July 21, we published a mini-investigative piece that showed that the Department of Transportation, a federal agency, had in 2003 known about and withheld compelling research showing the deadly risks of multitasking behind the wheel. The story explained that the federal agency didn’t publish its data—including estimates that cell phone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002—because of fears of angering Congress. (Congress had previously admonished the Department of Transportation to avoid certain political issues.)

In the story, I quoted Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety, as saying: “We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up.”

On the next Sunday, July 27, we published a story about research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute that showed texting by truck drivers increased risk of crash or near crash by twenty-three times. The story also talked about Dr. Strayer’s research. At the time, fourteen states had banned texting while driving, including Utah.

The reaction to the articles was something my editors said they’d rarely seen, and whereas we thought I’d do one or two stories on the subject, now my editors wanted to know what else was in my notebook.

“There’s a guy I’ve heard about in Utah,” I told Adam. “His name is Reggie Shaw.”

TERRYL PICKED ME UP
at the airport. She was as perky as she’d been on the phone, and at once friendly and intense. What most stuck out in our conversation as we drove up I-15 was something totally unrelated to the story. She talked about how she wanted to encourage young Mormon women to go to college before they got married, or at least to find some sense of purpose to go along with having and raising a family. This seems pretty basic, but she was from Logan, where people got married young and had kids, and that was the point. She wanted to shake up her environment and challenge assumptions.

I also was struck by the crash site. It was the scene of horrific violence, and yet it was surrounded by abject beauty. You could see how Brigham Young would’ve come over the mountains into Utah and thought:
This is it.

In the Cache County prosecutor’s office, I met Leila and Jackie. Leila was still nearly inconsolable with grief.

I first met Reggie in Tremonton, I believe. He wouldn’t go to the crash site. It was too painful. I did drive back with him to Salt Lake City, and he told me the story about the young woman he’d been on a date with who had the newspaper article about him taped to her mirror. Reggie was self-effacing, kind, open, and carrying a deep, open wound.

The article about Reggie ran on August 29, 2009.

IN THE SPRING OF
2010, the paper and I were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, a significant validation that we’d illuminated a widespread hazard, and crediting us with “stimulating widespread efforts to curb distracted driving”; as part of our supporting evidence in the paper’s nomination, we noted that
Webster’s
dictionary had named “distracted driving” its word of the year in 2009. There was another Pulitzer Prize given that year, to the
Washington Post
, that had me thinking about the bigger issues at stake with distraction. The spectacular feature story focused on the trial of a man who had been so distracted by a cell phone call that he’d left his son strapped in a car seat in a sweltering car. The car was not moving. The man was not driving. The boy spent nine hours strapped inside the car, and died.

That spring, I embarked on a series of stories called “Your Brain on Computers” about how heavy technology use impacts the brain. I learned more about the addiction side, began to understand the connections between some of these ideas, and kept trying to understand the central paradox: We all know that texting and driving is dangerous, but we do it anyway.
Why?

Among the things I learned was how widespread the potential had become for distraction. In one story, I explored how doctors are getting distracted, a story that included one of the most harrowing anecdotes I’d heard about in all my reporting on a subject: A neurosurgeon in Denver was accused of making personal calls during surgery and, owing to distraction, left the patient partially paralyzed. It was a particularly horrific outcome but not a totally singular example of electronic distraction among doctors, nurses, and key medical technicians.

A medical journal called
Perfusion
, focused on cardiopulmonary bypass surgery, did a survey and found that 55 percent of technicians monitoring the bypass machines said they’d talked on their cell phones during surgery and half had texted. They did that even though about 40 percent said talking on the phone was “always an unsafe practice,” and around half said the same of texting. As I noted in my story, the study’s authors wrote: “Such distractions have the potential to be disastrous.”

ALL THAT REPORTING GAVE
me a backdrop and experience to approach this book. But it was only that: backdrop. This book was, except for a handful of instances where I quoted previous articles, reported entirely from scratch.

The reporting for this book consisted of: extensive phone and in-person interviews with dozens of people; police and law enforcement reports; historical documents, some first-source and some accounts collected by reputable sources, like museums; use of audio and video recordings and of transcripts from law enforcement interviews and of court proceedings. In particular, these transcripts and recordings were used to reconstruct witness interviews, court hearings, and legislative proceedings. Quotations were taken directly from the recordings or transcripts. Without exception, I tried to stay completely true to the spirit of the event. So, too, with the letter; only in rare cases did I change a word or use ellipses to try to avoid confusion. I summarized sections that were redundant or ancillary.

Other crucial documentation included handwritten notes and personal records made at the time of the events from participants, including Gaylyn White, Reggie’s therapist, and Jon Bunderson, Reggie’s lawyer. I was allowed access to these records only because Reggie gave his permission to allow them to be shared with me, or turned over.

Another key allowance was made me by the court and Judge Willmore. He unsealed the record of this case, which had been previously sealed. Reggie also acceded to this. It enabled me to see videotapes of key hearings, as well as read certain crucial documents. I also received both official and unofficial documentation (Terryl’s handwritten notes) from the prosecutor’s office, and provided by Terryl.

As noted, there are a handful of places in the book where I cite reporting from other media, notably the
New York Times
. In many cases where I made such a citation, I was relying on a story I had myself written for the paper, reflecting my own familiarity with the material. In such cases, I did not necessarily write in the book that I had written the
Times
article. That is simply because I did not wish to interrupt the flow of the story with an introduction of my role in the reporting.

This powerful trove of documentation, in totality, not only gave me a concrete base of reporting. It also served to reinforce and provide context and guidance for what was the most significant source of reporting: the extraordinary cooperation of the people in this book. One person after the next shared their stories, perspectives, motivations, hopes, and fears. These countless conversations, some by phone, some in-person, involved much soul-searching, sometimes tears, and laughter. In that way, this book represents a collective expression, even exhalation, of emotion that I feel very fortunate to have been able to record. Broadly, I offer my deepest thanks to everyone who saw fit to share of themselves.

Memories can obviously be unreliable, and accounts biased. To create the fairest possible account, I sought to use more than one source to document events. By way of example, when describing Reggie’s interaction with his counselor, Gaylyn, I matched his account with hers, and with the documentation from the sessions. That same principle applied to meetings among the prosecutors, or when Reggie and his family met with Bunderson. Much more often than not, the accounts of various parties were highly consistent; people might have had different perspectives of an event—say, how they felt at the crash site—but the accounts of what was said, and by whom, rarely differed or by much. There is also no substitute for getting to know people over time, which is a luxury I was afforded given that I started meeting the key people in this story in 2009 and remained in contact until the final reporting in the spring of 2014.