A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

by Matt Richtel

  They graduated to Super Nintendo, also a 16-bit system, and Mario Kart, a racing game. A friend of Phill’s named Ryan was living in a one-bedroom apartment located behind the Shaws’ house. On summer mornings, Ryan would knock on the back door and get Nick and Reggie out of bed to play Mario.

  “We’d play for hours and hours. And if we had baseball or football, we’d take a break and go practice and then come home and play again,” Reggie remembers.

  When it came to technology, Reggie had come of age in an extraordinary time. Just a few years before he was born, in 1983, Time magazine did a twist on its person of the year feature and instead named the personal computer its “Machine of the Year.” The cover heralded “The Computer Moves In.”

  REGGIE’S OWN ADOPTION OF technology very much paralleled what was happening around the country, a phenomenon documented in a series of pioneering studies initiated by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1999. They show an explosion in use of media by young people.

  In the first study (1999), Kaiser found that the average child spent five hours and twenty-nine minutes using media per day. Within the average, older children ages eight to eighteen spent nearly double the time with media than toddlers. Boys spent slightly more time than girls, and minorities slightly more than whites.

  In 1999, television was the media that got most of the attention, at about two hours and forty-five minutes per day, compared to eighty-five minutes listening to music (tapes, CDs, or the radio), and forty-four minutes reading or being read to. At that point, only about twenty-one minutes were spent using the computer for fun, and twenty minutes on video games. There was virtually no Internet use.

  The second study, in 2004, showed big change. There was massive access to new kinds of media that hadn’t existed in the mainstream just five years earlier. Take instant messaging, which the 2004 report found to be in 60 percent of homes with children, but that hadn’t been in virtually any home five years earlier. That second report found that 74 percent of homes had Internet, up from 47 percent in 1999.

  The 2004 report found that about 40 percent of children age eight to eighteen had a cell phone (most on the upper end of that age range). There wasn’t even a baseline from the previous study, given the low use of cell phones at the turn of the century.

  The third report, in 2009, showed another leap in media use by young people. The average eight- to eighteen-year-old was consuming ten hours and forty-five minutes of media per day.

  How? How was it possible to use almost as much media as there were waking hours? The answer: multitasking. The study found that the typical person in that age group spent about 7.5 hours using “entertainment media,” but that a good chunk of that was spent multitasking—using more than one source of media at a time—and those hours were double-counted by the researchers.

  Their attention was divided a good chunk of the day even within the media space.

  The researchers found the change owed in large part to access by children of personal devices, like iPods and cell phones; about 66 percent of eight- to eighteen-year-olds had cell phones, not quite double the percent from the study five years earlier.

  Of note, the new media appeared to be taking time from the biggest screen draw of them all—television. The study found that children’s viewing of traditional television had fallen twenty-five minutes per day from 2004. But a look deeper shows a catch. Kids were now accessing television programming on computers—including phones, the Internet, and other gadgets. As a result, overall consumption of television content actually grew. By now, children were watching 4.5 hours of television programming a day, up from three hours and fifty minutes in the previous study. And by 2009, roughly an hour of video consumption was done on a device other than the TV.

  There was a fascinating omission from the 2009 report. It did not include texting or talking on the cell phone in its definition of media use. That was extra. On average, the report found, the average high schoolers texted for an hour and thirty-five minutes each day. They were doing that in addition to the other media and tasks.

  They, and others, were doing it while driving. In 2007, a survey by Nationwide Insurance found that 73 percent of people reported talking on a cell phone while driving, with teen drivers showing the highest use of any demographic.

  While Reggie came of age, teen media use soared, and multitasking with it.

  REGGIE DIDN’T NEED TECHNOLOGY to be social. He was plenty charismatic, but in a quiet way. He didn’t demand attention but everyone liked him, including the girls. He spent a lot of his waking hours thinking about them. The first one he really lost it for was Cammi. He met her through a friend and the chemistry was powerful.

  His friends and family weren’t so sure about the whole thing. At first, for instance, Dallas didn’t like Cammi. It bummed Dallas out that Reggie spent less time with him than with this tall brunette, who Dallas thought was just okay, and reasonably pretty. But Reggie and Cammi would be locked at the hip, and the lips. Some light public smooching, sitting on the couch holding hands.

  Then Dallas came to appreciate the fact Reggie was so into someone who seemed so into him. “I was a jerk to her at first. But she was a real sweet girl.”

  Reggie’s mom felt otherwise.

  “Everyone in town knew she didn’t like Cammi,” Dallas says of Mary Jane. “She didn’t want her son being serious and being stuck in town.”

  Mary Jane makes no bones about it. “She was darling to look at, but she had no personality whatsoever,” Mary Jane says, pulling no punches. “She was awful.”

  The reason for this strong reaction? Mary Jane believed Cammi was a roadblock to Reggie going on a mission. To Mary Jane, the young woman was putting her passions and wants ahead of Reggie’s dream.

  Valid or not, Mary Jane’s conspiracy theories underscored how invested the family was in Reggie’s mission, something he professed to want so badly himself.

  After high school graduation, Reggie went to a year of college in Virginia, and to play basketball. He was good enough to make the team but not good enough to get a scholarship. Ed doubted if Reggie knew it, but the family paid the tuition in no small part because they wanted to get him away from Cammi.

  Yes, the family wanted Reggie to fall in love and get married and have a family. But the mission came first and everything would follow.

  AT VIRGINIA, REGGIE HAD a good time, and was a decent student. He developed some confidence and a better jump shot.

  In May, the semester over, he came home to go on his mission. In June, just a few months before the accident, Lisa and Van Park attended his farewell at the Garland Tabernacle, a modest red-brick church with spires on each side. Inside, dark wood pews beneath cylindrical lights hung from the ceiling. Reggie gave a brief talk. Afterward, the group went back to the Shaw’s house and had a quick celebratory lunch.

  Then later that day, Reggie went over to visit the Parks at their two-story, five-bedroom house just a block from the high school. They sat outside and the Parks gave their well-wishes to a boy who they imagined was the kind of kid they wouldn’t mind seeing their daughter with.

  “I was so excited for him to go to Canada,” Lisa reflects.

  Just a few days later, Reggie returned home, ashamed.

  “Knowing him, I’d have thought: He’s just got to clear some things up. He’ll get it together and he’ll just go back,” Lisa says. “I never felt ‘What a disappointment.’ If you’re Christian in your heart, that’s not how you act.”

  Then September 22 came around. That night, Lisa heard about the wreck from Van. But the intensity and the severity of things didn’t quite hit until a few days later, when she paid her regular visit to a small nail salon in Tremonton. The woman who gave Lisa her clear polish and French tip was Chantel Gubeli, who was married to the brother of Cammi.

  “Can you believe what happened to Reggie?” Lisa recalls Chantel asking her.

  The more Chantel told Lisa about the accident, the more Lisa’s heart broke. It m
ust’ve been the road conditions, or some freak accident. It couldn’t have been Reggie’s fault. “He’s more mature than that. He’s more responsible than that.”

  “She told me about the families of the men who’d been killed,” Lisa says. “I remember thinking: ‘There may not be a chance for them to forgive him.’ ”

  CHAPTER 10

  REGGIE

  MIDMORNING, THREE DAYS AFTER the accident, Reggie walked out of the house for the first time. It had just snowed. Reggie thought: It is so bright out here. He put the keys into the ignition of the chevy. He drove alone. Every car that went by was a terror, a potential fatality. Something just clicked. He’d see the counselor after all.

  Up the stairs, he found the office of Gaylyn White, the counselor his mother had asked him to see. Reggie had relented. The office was small, with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf along one wall. Gaylyn sat behind her desk, a simple thing with a laptop on it. He took a seat in one of the chairs in front of the desk. Gaylyn noticed in particular Reggie’s sad eyes. She’d known him a long time, and he always had sad-looking eyes, she thought, even though he was an easygoing, happy person. Now there was nothing playful beneath the sad eyes.

  She knew about the accident, of course. She wanted to hear his telling of it. He started by telling her about the morning of the accident, how his mom had gotten him out of bed because he’d slept through his alarm. By then he was crying, sobbing, pulling at the box of Kleenex on Gaylyn’s desk. It was bothering him, killing him: He knew the story’s terrible ending, of course, but a lot of the details were missing. He couldn’t picture what happened.

  He told her about driving the SUV over a hill and then going down the other side. The weather was bad.

  “I crossed the center line, just a little bit, and I hit the car.”

  He was sobbing.

  “Reggie, why do you think you can’t remember what happened?”

  He shrugged. He thought: Because the details aren’t important to me. What really matters is that those two men are dead and what are their families going to do now?

  Gaylyn listened and typed notes into her laptop. She tried, as always, to keep her typing unobtrusive, so Reggie wouldn’t get distracted. But she was typing even less than usual. That’s because she realized early on in the conversation that she ought to keep the notes modest, in case there were legal implications should Reggie eventually face charges. Even recognizing there was doctor-patient confidentiality, she wanted to be careful about what she put on paper.

  She asked Reggie why he thought he was having trouble remembering what happened at the time of the accident. He didn’t know. She posited: “You probably went into shock. That’s why you’re not remembering.”

  Reggie nodded. It sounded right. “I can’t believe I could do something like this.”

  He couldn’t remember. It had just been an accident, right? So why did he feel like he’d done something so wrong?

  Gaylyn gave Reggie some tasks: exercise, write in a journal, meditate. She said they should meet again, and he agreed. She told him he should start writing letters to the families of Keith and Jim, not necessarily to send them but just to express himself.

  And so he went back to his room and started writing. Letters and letters to the families of Jim and Keith. They read, over and over again: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  AFTER THE SESSION, GAYLYN couldn’t help but think about the larger picture of Reggie’s life. He’d just returned, under difficult circumstances, from his mission. Not that she judged him. But she also understood that Reggie might not feel that way, that he might be carrying a heavy weight of feeling like he’d let down himself and his family and his community. “I can’t imagine having to come home,” she says of the idea of returning from a mission early, and under a cloud. She says she wonders whether people who came home prematurely might be better off living somewhere else for a while, so they would not have to deal with feeling judged. “I’m amazed people come home to the community. I don’t know how you go home to the community.”

  TEN DAYS LATER, ON October 5, Reggie returned to Gaylyn. This time, he told her he was feeling better. “He was acting like he was doing okay,” she recalls. He exhibited less anxiety. Her notes, released with Reggie’s permission, read: “He reports some ruminating and wishing more than anything else he had not been on the road at that moment.”

  Gaylyn wasn’t particularly buying that Reggie’s mind had calmed or his anxiety and even depression had lifted. She suspected that Reggie was aware that the $65-an-hour fee she charged—there was no insurance for her visits—could be a hardship on his family. Reggie, she thought, hated to displease people, particularly his family. There were so many pressures on him: not to let his family down, particularly after the mission return, and not to compound whatever shame he perceived they felt by him getting in trouble with the law, going to jail, or whatever might happen.

  Gaylyn talked to him about understanding that the past is a path that is behind us, not the path we are destined to take in the future.

  Of course, she felt strongly she should see him again but doubted she would.

  She let her mind connect dots between the accident and his failed mission. She wasn’t sure of the details, but she could surmise that he’d told someone at the Mission Training Center in Provo that he’d done something inappropriate in the lead-up to the mission.

  That much was commendable, she thought. Ultimately, he had told the truth. But if he’d gotten to the training center in the first place, it surely meant that somewhere along the line he probably lied. He’d had to have told someone he didn’t have any problems, such as premarital sex, to bar his place on the mission.

  And so Gaylyn was left wondering whether Reggie was sincerely traumatized by the accident, and therefore couldn’t remember what had happened, or whether there was something more insidious occurring.

  “I was wondering whether or not his sense of conflict about the accident was genuine confusion, or another lie.”

  SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT the mission. Reggie had lied, several times, in the lead-up to his mission. He had lied to his bishop about having sex.

  His lies weren’t particularly big or unusual. After all, it’s not uncommon for young people to lie to parents or a pastor about their having premarital sex. And they tell those lies even when there isn’t the intense cultural pressure that Reggie felt as part of a small Mormon community. The very language used by people in Tremonton betrayed just how intense that pressure was. Mary Jane feared a “disgrace” when Reggie came home. Gaylyn even wondered about how people come home after a failed mission. The environment explains how Reggie could have felt himself in a fishbowl or crucible; how he’d put his family in a bad light.

  What Gaylyn was wondering as Reggie sat in her office was whether the first failed mission had upped the stakes for Reggie. He’d already felt he let his family down once. Now, so soon after coming home, he was behind the wheel during a deadly wreck. What if he’d done something wrong? How could this young man sustain another disappointment?

  And Gaylyn didn’t know the full story—just how the lies tortured Reggie and left him questioning how he behaved when forced to confront difficult truths.

  DURING THANKSGIVING BREAK of Reggie’s freshman year in Virginia, he came back to Tremonton to see the family, Cammi, and his bishop, David Lasley, who lived just down the street from the Shaws.

  The bishop is an important job, but perhaps not as significant as the term bishop might communicate to people of other faiths. The bishop is a lay leader for the local ward, which is one of the small but critical parts of the highly organized and hierarchal Mormon structure. Each ward has about five hundred people, and roughly ten wards make up a stake, which has a president.

  Reggie set up a meeting to talk to Bishop Lasley about going on a mission, Reggie’s lifelong dream. In a modest office, the bishop asked Reggie about his interests, passions, and intentions. He also asked if Reggie had violated any
tenets, like having recent premarital sex. Reggie assured him that he had not.

  It was the truth. But not for long.

  A few weeks later, Reggie came home again for the Christmas break. One afternoon, he found himself at Cammi’s house. They’d been talking about this moment lately. They went to her bedroom, her queen-sized bed.

  She told him she loved him. He told her that he loved her, too, the first time he’d said that to her, to anyone.

  They did it. It was good, it was fun. “I was nineteen, and there’s only one thing that really seemed important.” Love or sex? “Probably sex,” Reggie says, looking back. “I thought it was love, but thinking back, lust and love, they seemed awfully close to each other at the time.”

  And commingled with them was guilt. A few days after he lost his virginity, he went, as always, to church. He couldn’t pray.

  “I tried my best to act like it was a normal Sunday and go into church, but it didn’t feel right. I didn’t belong.”

  A few days later, Reggie went back to the bishop’s office for a follow-up meeting.

  “Things still good on the girl front?” Bishop Lasley asked.

  “We’re good. Everything’s good,” Reggie said. He tried to look the bishop right in the eye.

  A few hours later, he saw Cammi. She asked: “Did you tell him?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I told him.” He explained to Cammi that the bishop said Reggie could get a onetime exception. “He thinks that I’ll be okay and I’ll be able to go, as long as we’re good and as long as we’ve stopped.”

  He’d lied to Cammi, too.

  He was afraid that if he told her the truth, she might tell the bishop, or someone, thus ensuring he would stay home and be with her, and not go on a mission.

  “She didn’t want me to go. She wanted me to stay home and get married.”

  Back in the office with Gaylyn, the counselor, the issue didn’t come up. But it was weighing heavily on Reggie, and hadn’t stopped weighing on him for many months. He felt in some way that it was a kind of original sin, a terrible thing he’d done that spoke to a dark thing inside of him.