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

by Matt Richtel

  That very day, Singleton wrote another subpoena, took it to Baird on Tuesday, May 8, and got it off to T-Mobile.

  Then, not surprisingly, more bureaucracy, waiting, and back-and-forth.

  On May 23, he spoke to T-Mobile and was told he needed to fax the subpoena to a legal compliance agent in T-Mobile’s Law Enforcement Relations Group. That same day, at just a few minutes after noon, he called Leila to let her know the gears continued to grind. The next day, Singleton pestered the T-Mobile agent.

  She told Singleton she had news. “We’re faxing the information tomorrow.” When he heard it, he felt a chill.

  HIS CASE NOTES DON’T reflect the excitement he felt when the fax arrived.

  “Received fax from T-Mobile. Briana Bishop, 12/8/87, is the owner of the phone # (801) XXX–3126.”

  Briana Bishop, age nineteen. The woman on the other end of the text.

  THE DAY AFTER RECEIVING the information about Bishop, Singleton called a fellow investigator, Stan Olsen. Previously, Olsen had held Singleton’s post in Brigham City but had since moved to the Farmington office, which was located closer to where Briana Bishop lived. Singleton and Olsen discussed how to approach Briana, and they decided to jointly interview her after Singleton made the initial contact.

  He called the mystery woman at 2:30 on May 29.

  “Ms. Bishop, my name is Agent Scott Singleton. I’m calling from the Utah Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Hello. What’s this about?”

  “I can’t tell you over the phone. I’d like to arrange a time to get together.”

  At 2:48, Briana called back. They arranged to meet the next night after work at the Farmington office. Singleton was excited. He might finally get some concrete answers.

  It wouldn’t be so easy. Between the time that Singleton called Briana at 2:30 p.m. and the time she called back, she had two other phone calls. One was made to her friend Trisha, who was dating Reggie. The other call was with Reggie himself. It lasted eleven minutes.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, SINGLETON and Agent Olsen gathered around a wooden table in the modest Davis County office of the Highway Patrol in Farmington with Briana Bishop and her father, Steve Bishop.

  In Briana, Singleton saw a “young, blond, nineteen-year-old who was nervous, very nervous.” She wore work clothes. Singleton wore a dark shirt and a tie. He recorded the interview.

  “You’re not in any trouble, but we do believe that you have some critical information that you can supply to us,” Singleton told her, according to the transcript. “I’m going to show you a series of photographs,” he said. He showed her photos of young men, white, short hair, clean-cut, young men who at a distance could be mistaken for Reggie. She didn’t recognize them.

  He showed her Reggie’s picture. “Do you know that young man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. And who is he?”

  “Reggie Shaw.”

  Singleton asked their relationship and she explained, “Umm, we kind of dated a little bit, but we were mostly just friends. We hardly talk anymore.”

  Singleton asked what she knew about the accident.

  “A little bit, not too much, though,” Briana said.

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  “Umm, the morning that it happened, I got up, and I was getting ready for work. And I just texted him like I normally did, because I was dating him that day. And I so texted him to say good morning and what was up and stuff. And he texted me back and told me that he had just gotten in an accident and he thinks that the other two guys were dead and he was freaking out.”

  “And so he texted you and said—”

  Briana cut him off. “It was after it happened. Then I called to see if he was okay.”

  Singleton had figured this would be a tough interview and that Briana, being a friend of Reggie’s, may be evasive or even dishonest. He was also extremely aware of the other key person in the room, Briana’s dad. As Singleton would say later: “We were having to appease her father. He didn’t want to see her raked over the coals.” Initially, Singleton started to try to draw her out. He pressed gently for her to explain the initial text. Who had sent it? She had, she said.

  And then Agent Olsen asked: “You said good morning and his response was . . . ?”

  “I just got in an accident and I’m freaking out and I think the other two guys are dead.”

  What Briana apparently didn’t know is that the investigators had all the texting records. Singleton asked: “Do you think it’s possible maybe the accident occurred when he was reading your text?”

  “I don’t think so, because he told me right after, he said that he had just—he’s not one to sit there and text and stuff while he drives. He’ll hardly like—he’d hardly like even pick up the phone or anything while he’s driving.”

  Singleton’s frustration was simmering. He pulled out the phone logs.

  “These are a list of text messages. They start—the crash happened at 6:49. The texting starts prior to that time, 6:43, 6:45, 6:46, 6:47. These were all happening when he was driving.”

  Singleton had gotten the crash time slightly wrong—it was more likely between 6:47 and 6:48—but he made his point.

  Briana: “Hmm.”

  Singleton elaborated, explaining that the texting started when Reggie left his house and that the investigation shows he “was in the process of texting you, and he crossed the center line and he clipped a . . . and the car spun out of control, spun sideways, and was hit by a pickup truck and it killed these two individuals.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Singleton pulled out pictures of Keith and Jim that ran with their obituaries in the local paper. “This is a father who has a daughter, and this one is a father who has two little children. They were both married. I would really like as much help as I could because Reggie refuses to talk to us.”

  “I thought that he just texted me right after it happened.”

  Singleton said he had records for eleven texts between Reggie and Briana prior to the crash and for thirteen texts afterward.

  And her dad then asked a question. “So these are responses—she sends a response and he sends one back, that’s considered a text message?”

  Yep, Singleton explained. He was trying not to show his frustration. This young woman remembered sending a text to say good morning, something so insignificant, and claimed not to remember anything else. “The only one I remember is just like the one after the crash happened, like he just texted me. That’s all I remember about it.”

  They went back and forth, gentle parrying, trying to draw her out. Her dad said: “I think it’s important you tell them everything you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Every little detail.”

  “Like, that’s seriously all I remember about it. It was, you know, last September or so.”

  This was just shy of halfway through the interview. The investigators quickly covered a bunch of other ground: Who else Briana had talked to about the accident; how many texts she had sent that day; a bit about the process going forward. Briana asked: “So are you guys trying to get it so he goes to jail?”

  “What we want is accountability,” Agent Olsen responded. “If someone were to be texting and clipped your father while he was driving and was—and your father was killed,” he asked, “would you want accountability?”

  She had nothing further to offer—an indication of a standoff moving to a new phase, into a more formal legal arena, with the sides entrenching.

  Indeed, by now, Singleton and Rindlisbacher, emboldened by discovery, were nowhere near close to giving up. In fact, Briana’s own texting and phone records had offered them yet another level of indignation. Her records showed that she had sent Reggie six texts during his drive; he’d sent five, and she’d sent six.

  Eleven texts, sent and read by Reggie Shaw on his fateful drive.

  But Reggie didn’t know anything of this discovery. He felt in the clear. Besides, something very good was about
to happen, or so it seemed.

  REGGIE WAS IN THE living room when the call came in. It was the local bishop, Eldon Peterson. He’d taken over for David Lasley, the bishop who Reggie had lied to about having relations with his girlfriend.

  Reggie took the call on the landline.

  “Great news, Reggie.”

  Before the next words came out, Reggie’s eyes had already filled with tears.

  “You’re going on a mission,” Peterson told him. The bishop gave a few key details, namely, that Reggie would be leaving in less than two weeks. Get your bags packed, kid, you’re heading to Provo to the MTC, the Missionary Training Center, then to Canada, where you were supposed to go on the first mission.

  “I know how hard you’ve worked, Reggie.”

  Reggie wept with relief and joy.

  ON JUNE 7, AT three p.m., agents Singleton and Olsen took another crack at Briana. This time, unannounced. They showed up at Bukoos, a freight warehouse where she worked. They recorded the interview sitting in a back room with cubicles in it. They were the only people in the room but they shared a cubicle, the three of them, doing the interview.

  Singleton was sure that Briana wasn’t telling them everything, and suspected she’d been coached, maybe by Reggie. By coming to her place of work, they could avoid having her dad in the room and press a little harder.

  Singleton explained that the prosecutors were now looking at the case. “In pouring through the records, text and cell phone records, I got quite a bit of evidence. I know you haven’t been totally up front with me on what was said.”

  “I haven’t?” Briana asked.

  Singleton again explained about the cell phone records, the eleven text messages that took place before or just during the accident. And Briana responded: “That’s what me and my dad were talking about after we left, you know, because like I thought—I told my dad like I thought I had only text him once, but apparently I was texting him before. I don’t know.”

  “So you’re saying you could possibly have been wrong?”

  “I could have been wrong, yeah. I wasn’t completely sure.”

  Singleton was feeling a light buzz, the thrill of closing in on some truth, something that had been elusive. He followed up by asking about her exchanges with Reggie after the accident; what had Reggie said? She explained, as in the previous interview, that he’d gotten into an accident. “They just ran into each other.”

  Singleton: “I want to know absolutely everything.”

  “I don’t know what else to tell you. That’s like honestly all I remember.”

  Singleton’s frustration returned.

  “He’s looking at possibly a year at the maximum,” the agent said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “An obstruction of justice charge is a felony. An obstruction of justice is when you have information and you don’t provide that information.”

  “I’m telling you honestly like everything that I know.”

  The investigators turned their attention to before the crash. “So before the accident were you two texting back and forth to each other?” Olsen asked.

  “I guess, if it says we were.”

  “It shows 6:17 in the morning and there’s eleven texts.”

  “So I guess we were, yeah,” Briana answered.

  The investigators could see there would be no grand admission, beyond Briana acknowledging the existence of the call records. She wasn’t going to say that Reggie admitted to her what he’d been doing, or that he’d been doing it at the exact time of the wreck. At that point in the interview, Briana’s manager interrupted and asked how much longer the interview would take. The investigators began to wind down. They had a few more questions. Singleton asked Briana about a phone call that took place just a week earlier, the night before their previous interview of her. He had gotten the phone records and he could see that Briana and Reggie had spoken. He wanted to know if Reggie had coached her.

  “Did he give you any indication of how to answer questions or don’t tell them this or that?”

  “No, he never said that. He just said like answer honestly is all he said. I don’t think he’s trying to hide anything.”

  Singleton left disappointed. He knew the prosecutors were on the fence, at best, about charging Reggie with negligent homicide. It would’ve helped if Briana could have said something to the effect that Reggie had confessed culpability, or said something about texting, or even coached her to obstruct the investigation. “I was hoping there would be some kind of smoking gun. But it didn’t exist.”

  ON JUNE 11, MARY Jane called Bunderson and told him that Reggie was planning to leave in ten days for the Mission Training Center, then on to Winnipeg. Bunderson put in a message to Michael Glauser, the attorney for the Church, seeking guidance. Reggie was on his way.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE LAWMAKERS

  IN MAY OF 2007, as Singleton hunted for answers, the governor of the state of Washington, Christine Gregoire, signed into effect the first state law banning texting while driving. She was, according to the Seattle Times, “flanked by children who suffered serious injuries after being hit by drivers.”

  The article noted that the texting ban, which would go into effect the following January, would carry a $101 fine for violators, while a second measure, also signed by the governor, would ban motorists from using a handheld phone. That law would go into effect in July 2008.

  Across the country, legislators were grappling with whether to regulate cell phone use by drivers. The most intriguing battle had gone on in California. There, a state legislator named Joe Simitian, whose district included Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, had been nearly beside himself since 2001 as he battled the cell phone industry over a proposed ban on handheld phone use by drivers.

  When he’d first introduced legislation, he stood in front of a legislative committee and explained that all he was asking for was to codify into law something that, he said, the cell phone companies already acknowledged: Using a handheld cell phone while driving was dangerous.

  For instance, in an early hearing at the statehouse, in April 2001, Simitian, a Democratic assemblyman (later elected to the state senate), read from Sprint’s own marketing materials. “When using your Sprint PCS phone in the car, focus on driving, not talking, and use your hands-free kit,” the document read. “Failure to follow these instructions may lead to serious personal injury and possibly property damage.”

  As Simitian stood at the podium, reading the document, trying to reconcile the company’s clear recognition of the risks with its opposition to law, he said: “I am at an absolute loss.”

  But year after year, his legislation had been killed. Lobbyists from the major cell phone companies, including Cingular, Sprint, and AT&T, threw a kitchen sink of arguments against the rule, arguing, among other things, that mobile phones posed no different a distraction than other tasks, like eating. Lobbyists for Sprint argued that a law banning handheld phone use could be used to discriminate against minority motorists, who were more likely to be pulled over because of racial bias by police. Broadly, the carriers argued that general education was sufficient to remind motorists about the risks of getting distracted by their devices. Never mind that cell phone use by drivers was exploding.

  In fact, Simitian pointed out that the California Highway Patrol had been collecting data since 2001 and found that cell phone use was the number one cause each year in distractions leading to car accidents.

  In 2006, after five years of battling, he got his bill passed. It was signed by the governor in September of that year, and was slated to take effect in July 2008 (to give law enforcement, consumers, and companies time to adapt).

  Next up for Simitian was a texting ban.

  But the idea of Utah getting in on the action seemed unlikely and even preposterous. This was, after all, a deeply red state, one that by numerous measures was among the top five most conservative states in the country. State legislators did not look kindly on governme
nt regulations they felt would impinge on personal freedoms.

  By way of example, there was no primary law requiring the use of seat belts by drivers, and no law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets. About the time legislators in other states were thinking about restricting bans on cell phones for motorists, Utah legislators were busy rejecting a different safety measure to require booster seats for children up to the age of eight years old, recalls Carl Wimmer, a Utah policeman turned state lawmaker from a Salt Lake City suburb and one of the more conservative members of the state legislature. And he sat on the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee, which was a gateway for these sorts of legislation.

  Wimmer recalls safety advocates and families coming to the hearings. “They’d line up these kids who would come up and say: Please help save my life,” he says. Wimmer felt for them, to the point that he at one point put up $1,000 of his own money to buy booster seats and give them away to any family who wanted one. But he wouldn’t vote for such a law, arguing that it was just another example of the government sticking its nose into people’s business.

  He felt the same about texting and driving bans.

  “If you’re going to live in a free society, you have to give people the liberty to do what they want.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE NEUROSCIENTISTS

  IN APRIL 2012, DR. Atchley attended a traffic safety conference in Orlando, Florida. He found himself on a panel with an Internet addiction expert with a particularly intimate knowledge of addiction, having spent time himself in rehab.

  His name: David Greenfield. In the early 1970s, at Paramus High School in northern New Jersey, when Greenfield was just shy of fifteen years old, he was called to the principal’s office and given a choice: Go to rehab or get expelled.

  It was post-Vietnam, a hippie era, a culture of encouragement and defiance around drugs. And, adding to that, Greenfield’s family was under duress: His dad, a graphic designer, and his mom, an art teacher and art therapist, were on the rocks. A very unstable marriage, with four kids, David being the oldest and most sensitive.