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

basketball court, as well as with the video game controller. His kid brother loved those video games. He also thought of Reggie as the son who tended to do whatever his mom and dad asked with no protest, the kid who cleaned up after himself.
    Now he’d been involved in an accident with two fatalities.
    What, their mother asked Phill, should Reggie do?
    “Don’t say anything to anybody.”
    When they had arrived at the hospital, Mary Jane passed along word to Reggie. “Don’t say too much,” Reggie says his mother told him. Leave it to the police to piece it together. As she puts it, she instructed him: “Let them figure things out, and we’ll go from there.”
    ABOUT AN HOUR LATER , sitting outside the emergency room, State Trooper Rindlisbacher gave up on getting answers. He escorted Reggie inside, where the young man took and passed a blood test. And it seemed there was little for the trooper to do. He could’ve written a “left of center” ticket, a moving violation that would have laid the matter to rest. Plenty of law enforcement personnel would’ve done exactly that and not been unjustified in so doing.
    “Sometimes I like to follow things through and follow up,” Rindlisbacher reflects of himself, adding with a laugh, “Some of my coworkers think I’m too thorough.”
    Once in a while, his tenacity invited citizen complaints. There was the time he got investigated by internal affairs after being accused by a woman of stalking her family. Rindlisbacher was exonerated. He wasn’t stalking, he says; he was trying to ferret out a liar in a set of bizarre circumstances. It had started very innocently when he pulled a guy over because a Christmas tree tied to the roof of the man’s car was falling off.
    Then, coincidentally, Rindlisbacher caught the same guy speeding a few weeks later, this time driving a different car. What piqued Rindlisbacher’s interest was that both of the cars had Idaho plates, and the guy had an Idaho driver’s license. The man insisted he lived in Idaho, even though Rindlisbacher had pulled him over twice locally, in Logan. The trooper did a little background check and discovered the guy had a prior arrest for meth possession. It’s a tax-related crime in Utah to reside there over an extended period of time while claiming you live in another state.
    But the guy kept claiming he lived in Idaho. It didn’t add up.
    So Rindlisbacher says he decided to find out for himself. Every few weeks, he drove by the family’s residence and took pictures, to prove they lived in Utah, not Idaho. It turned out, Rindlisbacher explains, that the wife of the guy was the daughter of a police captain in Las Vegas. The captain suggested she call Rindlisbacher’s headquarters and file a complaint. She did—for stalking.
    “People complain about the stupidest things. They don’t want to take responsibility for their actions,” Rindlisbacher says. It really ticks him off when they don’t. “That’s why I say: ‘Tell me the truth and there’s no problem.’ ”
    Rindlisbacher was sure Reggie wasn’t being square with him. But how to get at the truth? Maybe he could talk to Reggie again. After a few days’ reflection, Rindlisbacher hoped, the young man might explain better why he’d wandered across the yellow line—and more than once.

CHAPTER 3
    THE NEUROSCIENTISTS
    T HIS IS MICKEY HART’S brain.”
    Mickey Hart was the drummer for the Grateful Dead. An image of his brain appears on a twenty-four-inch computer monitor. To its right, another monitor, a sleek thirty-two-inch Mac, features a splash of windows—email, news sites, a work project.
    Mickey’s brain is red on the top with blue sticking out on the bottom.
    “The red is the cortex.”
    Few know more about Mickey Hart’s brain, about the brain in general, than the man pointing to the monitor. His name is Adam Gazzaley. He’s a neurologist, an MD, with a PhD in neuroscience. He runs the new neuroimaging lab at the University of