A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Read Online Free PDF Page A

day, which stood to reason, given that there are more cars on the road at that time.
    In Utah, as elsewhere, teen drivers caused a disproportionate number of crashes. Statewide, teen drivers caused 26.8 percent of all crashes in 2005, and they caused 31.8 percent in Cache County, where that morning’s incident had taken place. Of the six deaths that occurred in wrecks the year before in the county, one was attributable to a teen driver.
    How many crashes nationally were caused by cell phones was not yet clear, but the emerging evidence was alarming. In 2003, researchers at Harvard University did a risk analysis and projected that motorists distracted by their cell phones caused 2,300 deaths each year and 330,000 injury accidents.
    That research was based largely on people dialing and talking on phones, holding them to their ears.
    But the opportunity for risk was growing, given the exploding power of devices. Text messages had been sent earlier than 1999, but that was a key year because a Japanese phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo, built the i-mode networking standard, which allowed for the exchange of mobile data. By 2002, according to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, more than 34 million subscribers were using that network for web access, email, and other functions.
    And 2006 was an important year for the mobile phone because of the growth of smartphone devices. An article in BusinessWeek billed 2006 “the year of the converged device.” It reported that 80 million smartphones had been sold. They were “smart” because they could do so many things beyond calling, like texting, emailing, surfing the Internet, playing games. “Some phones are now below $200, encouraging the clever phones to spread beyond corporate users and into early adopters in the consumer market,” the article pointed out.
    Most people didn’t yet have a smartphone. Reggie didn’t. But a smartphone wasn’t needed to send simple texts. Those you could do with the older phones, so-called feature phones. By 2006, people in the United States were sending around 12.5 billion texts a month, which sounds like a lot, but the technology really was embryonic. Two years later, there would be 75 billion texts sent a month, with around half of them sent by people under the age of thirty-five. Like a lot of new technology, it skewed toward the young. Rindlisbacher was among those with only a passing knowledge of texting.
    But he sensed something was amiss.
    WHAT IRKED TROOPER RINDLISBACHER was Reggie’s written statement. My car pulled to the left and I met another car in the middle.
    To Rindlisbacher, this made it sound like Reggie was “rubbing off some of the blame.” We met in the middle. To Rindlisbacher, it was like Reggie was trying to justify it, “to make it sound like it was partially the other guy’s fault.”
    What Rindlisbacher didn’t know was that there were reasons why Reggie wasn’t saying much. One was that he was genuinely having trouble remembering what had happened. It had all unfolded so quickly.
    The other explanation had to do with a phone call. It was placed less than an hour after the accident. Reggie’s mother, moments after she’d arrived at the scene, had dialed her oldest son, Phill.
    When the call came in, Phill, coincidentally, was himself driving. He was in West Sacramento, California, a lawyer heading to his job at a firm that handled property-loss cases for State Farm insurance. Phill felt compelled to answer because he was surprised to hear from his mom at that time of day.
    When she told him what had happened, Phill’s mind split in two—“big-brother mode and attorney mode,” as he put it later. He had no idea what the facts were, other than that two men had died. He was imagining the civil liability, for Reggie, and his folks.
    The Shaw family was close, kin, but Phill and Reggie were separated by eleven years. The Reggie who Phill knew was a friendly little guy, a competitor on the football field and