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

by Matt Richtel

  This new generation of neuroscientists isn’t antitechnology, despite their cautionary findings. Not Dr. Strayer, certainly not Dr. Gazzaley, or any others of his ilk. They are tied to networks, reliant on phones, eager to communicate their messages and science, use technology to develop and further it. And then there’s just everyday tasks; Dr. Atchley got lost heading to his lunch talk and a phone came in handy in finding the correct steakhouse. Once he got there, he plugged in his PowerPoint presentation so the audience could ooh and aah.

  This is, quite obviously, not a question of either/or—do we either live with technology or give it up entirely?

  “The question,” says Dr. Atchley, “is how do we balance this stuff?”

  CHAPTER 28

  HUNT FOR JUSTICE

  TERRYL’S JULY 6 MEMO, and her ongoing persistence were causing a stir.

  It was time for the roundtable meeting with all the lawyers in the office of the Cache County Attorney’s Office. This meant Terryl, Baird, and Daines, the county attorney. In preparation, Baird distributed copies of three statutes: the definitions of manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and negligent homicide.

  Almost without discussion, the group tossed out manslaughter. They began to discuss the other options. It was clear from Terryl’s memo where she stood.

  Baird was convinced otherwise. In the meeting, he made a few points: This technology is new, and it’s not fair to assume Reggie should’ve known better, at least in a way that satisfies the standard of criminal negligence.

  “My mind-set was: Let’s send a message, but do it with a different charge, a lesser charge,” he says. “Let’s send a message with this one—and next time we won’t be so kind.”

  There was another factor in Baird’s mind: Reggie “seemed like a decent kid.”

  By now, it seemed fairly clear that Reggie had lied—he must’ve known about the texts. But Baird wasn’t that troubled by the apparent deception.

  “As a prosecutor, people lie to me every day,” he says. “When people get backed into a corner, they will say things that are not always the truth. They cast themselves in false light. I understood this kid was lying to us, but I really wasn’t going to hold that against him.”

  Baird considered it a positive that Reggie was serving on a mission. Baird had done a mission himself, to the Philippines. It wasn’t about the fact he and Reggie shared a common faith, he said. It was more the commitment to service; he says he’d look with equal favor upon someone in the peace corps.

  “Maybe we could do reckless driving,” he suggested. And he thought: “Negligent homicide carries such a stigma. I’m looking at this nineteen-year-old kid, thinking: This is a big burden to hang around his neck.”

  Besides, Baird had some empathy. Many years earlier he’d been a young man behind the wheel, momentarily distracted, with a life hanging in the balance.

  BAIRD WAS SIXTEEN. It was August. Farm country. Wide-open fields, dirt roads. Baird had recently gotten a Honda Nighthawk 650. He climbed on the motorcycle to go get a haircut, when his dad poked his head outside.

  “Son, you better get your damn helmet.”

  It struck Baird as odd, his dad reminding him to wear a helmet. “We were not helmet people.” This was partly familial and partly cultural in the sense that Utah is a place in which many people believe strongly in the concept of individual rights.

  Baird drove down the long dirt road, tall grass on either side. He was going forty miles an hour. It was hot. He wore short waterskiing shorts and a white tank top. Not far into the ride, he saw the local mailman in front of a house. Baird waved.

  “I turned my attention to in front of me,” Baird recalls.

  He saw the kid, the boy right there, right in the middle of the road.

  Baird could see the boy’s face. The boy just froze.

  Pop! Pop!

  The boy’s head hit squarely in the front headlamp.

  Baird went somersaulting. Rolled a couple of times. He had so much momentum, he came up and was running. Then he heard the boy’s mother coming out into the road.

  “She picked him up and she just started wailing,” Baird says. When he tells the story, he has to pause, for maybe a minute, choking back grief. He whispers, “Fudge,” a kind of expletive.

  The Utah Highway Patrol came to his house shortly thereafter to interview him, but mostly to reassure him. “The trooper sat down with me and my dad and he said: ‘I’m sorry, son, there was nothing you could do.’

  “It wasn’t like I looked away for a long time,” Baird states. And, besides, the boy just bolted into the road, apparently excited to retrieve the mail. “There was nothing I could do.”

  Baird says he thought about his case and Reggie’s.

  “I know what it’s like to be a young kid who gets into an accident,” he says. But he thought the similarities only went so far. “I don’t know that you could compare the cases.”

  TERRYL WRESTLED WITH TWO thoughts: (1) She didn’t agree with Tony, and (2) she respected him as much as any prosecutor she’d ever met. She’d come to the second realization some years earlier when they’d had a difficult back-and-forth over a tough case. Baird hadn’t brought the maximum charge, and Terryl was upset. In the end, Baird had to remind her that her aim should be justice, not the maximum penalty.

  It really moved Terryl, and, since that time, she’d tried to embody his message. He’s my favorite prosecutor, she thought to herself.

  But that didn’t mean she always agreed with him.

  The ultimate decision on how to proceed fell to Daines, the county attorney, though in practice this process was more democratic than tyrannical. As the conversation wore on, it seemed like he was siding with Baird. There just wasn’t precedent here, and there were just so many resources in the office.

  He drew out a middle ground.

  “Terryl, if you can find a prosecutor to take it, then we’ll pursue it.”

  In other words, he was leaving Terryl an opening.

  “He knew what he was doing. He knew what would happen if he gave me an opportunity. He knew exactly what I was going to do.”

  THERE WERE SEVEN LAWYERS who worked for the county, not including Daines. He was elected, the rest were county employees whose job status was not reliant on elections. Among the seven others, Don Linton, the chief deputy county attorney, held relative primacy.

  He’d been around for many years, working regularly with Terryl. He had a nickname for her—the “Sparkplug.”

  “The other attorneys knock. Everybody else knocks,” Linton says, in contrast to Terryl’s habit of bursting into her colleagues’ offices unannounced. “She never knocks.”

  Terryl saw Linton as someone who didn’t flinch in taking on unusual or tough cases; he’d had a particular interest in going after rapists and child abusers. Terryl figured Linton was her best shot.

  Just a few minutes after the meeting with Baird and Daines, Terryl found Linton in a corner office opposite Daines’, facedown in some papers.

  “Terryl throws open the door and says: ‘Hey, I need to talk to you.’ ”

  “Okay,” Linton said, both curious and bemused.

  Terryl held a rose-colored piece of paper, which she extended to Linton. Without looking closely, Linton could see bullet points, an explanation of some kind.

  “Don,” she started. “I’ve got something you have to do.”

  Linton gestured to one of the armchairs—Slow down, Terryl—and she took a seat.

  “These two rocket scientists were killed,” Terryl began, as she launched into the story of the accident.

  Up until then, Linton hadn’t heard a word about Reggie Shaw, hadn’t read about the case in the paper. He started to take it in, listening to the narrative and analyzing it from several sides.

  From a legal perspective, his primary stance, he wondered, What was the law here? He couldn’t and didn’t make a snap judgment.

  Instinctively, Linton also reacted to the story as a father. He and hi
s wife had four children, two boys and two girls, the youngest being Libby, nineteen years old at the time. And Linton thought of her as a “terrible driver.” A great musician, very bright, but not a good driver, Linton believed that she sometimes tailgated, and sometimes sped. And he knew that she texted, a lot; he suspected she did so when she drove.

  He almost immediately started thinking about the case not just from the victims’ perspectives but, as he puts it, from the “perpetrator’s perspective.” And also from the position of other possible perpetrators, including kids like Libby. “I was thinking about my daughter and her life and how it would change” if something like this happened to her.

  Linton glanced at the memo Terryl had handed him and could see now that it was a set of facts and assertions mirroring what Terryl was telling him—an outline of the case.

  As Terryl concluded, she said: “George isn’t interested,” referring to Daines.

  Terryl finished by saying: “I’ll do all the work, but you have to do this for me.” Of course, that wasn’t realistic, the victim’s advocate couldn’t do all the work.

  Linton didn’t commit. He told Terryl he’d do a little research. But she had piqued his interest, in a way he says likely wouldn’t have happened, absent her intervention. In fact, he recalls, it was this conversation that set fate on its course. “When she came into my office,” Linton says, “that was the spark that ignited the whole thing.”

  It is a sentiment echoed by Singleton, who says his efforts and conviction fell on deaf ears with the prosecutors until Terryl started pushing. “If it hadn’t been for her, no one would ever have heard of this,” he says. “It would’ve been a few months out of my life and a stack of paperwork that would’ve gone into the shredder.

  “When you meet her, she’s a very nice woman. She doesn’t seem like a hard-core person,” he says. “But if you want someone to go to bat for you, she’s the one.”

  She was just getting started, and now so was Linton.

  LINTON, LIKE THE OTHERS in his office, didn’t know much about the subject of texting and driving. He considered the concept “a mysterious bog.” He was fifty-two years old, a different generation, the last child of eight, who spent his first twelve years on an orchard farm where his family raised sheep and chickens.

  Still, even as he admitted that he might not be in the mainstream technologically, he was surprised at how little he could find on the subject of texting and driving and the law. He wasn’t the only one who hadn’t heard much about it. It just wasn’t out there. There was one case out of New York that was vaguely related. He went to Terryl’s office, and he told her he was coming up empty; the two nearly laughed about it, as if to say: Well, that shouldn’t stop us.

  But still, Linton needed more than he had in order to make a decision. He returned to his office. As he was searching online, he kept coming across one name: Dr. David Strayer. He was this local guy, a professor at the University of Utah, who seemed to be an authority on the risks of texting while driving and talking on the phone while driving. This fascinated Linton on two levels: A guy merely eighty miles away knew as much about this as anything else, and, more substantively, Dr. Strayer’s research had showed that using a phone behind the wheel was as risky as driving drunk.

  The thing that struck Linton as he reviewed Strayer’s research was what was happening inside the brain. He thought: I had no idea how much attention the mobile phone took from driving.

  “We were wondering if this was like driving while drinking a Coke, until Dr. Strayer came along,” Linton reflects. “Then I realized it wasn’t like drinking a Coke, it was like driving drunk, really drunk.”

  “The precedent that tipped it for me was not legal; it wasn’t a precedent of what was going on in other states. It was a scientific precedent,” he says.

  Since 1990, when Dr. Strayer had begun digging into the issue of driving and attention/distraction, he’d studied the subject from numerous angles, amassing a host of papers on various nuances. For instance, in 2001 he published a paper in Psychological Science showing how motorists got distracted just talking on a phone; in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2003 he showed that such cell phone–using drivers don’t see as much of their surroundings as drivers not on the phone. Even if they’re looking at the road, he’d found, their visual acuity was impaired by the cognitive demand of the phone.

  Also in 2003, he made a presentation at the International Symposium on Human Factors showing that cell phone use impaired drivers to the same level as .08 blood alcohol content, the level of legal intoxication in most states. At another conference, a year later, he showed that cell phone–using drivers are less focused on the road than drivers talking to a passenger in the car; the reason is because the passenger acts as a second set of eyes, modulating his or her conversation based on roadway conditions. Not so the person on the other end of the cell phone, who can’t see what is going on. In 2007, Dr. Strayer showed that motorists using cell phones do not get better with practice.

  Along the way, Dr. Strayer was doing other research, related to aging and attention, studying some of the impairment associated with Parkinson’s. But the majority was on driving and distraction, and most of it was not well funded. Dr. Strayer was operating on a shoestring budget, eking out grants, and he thought he knew why: In whose interest was it to discover that there was a risk to this thing that everyone loved doing, and that was one of the most culturally celebrated activities, multitasking?

  Still, Dr. Strayer had amassed a trove of data, much of it peer-reviewed and published in respectable scientific journals. And some of the most important coming from a researcher in Linton’s backyard. He’d made up his mind.

  Now he had to tell Daines. He hoped it would be a simple conversation, but there were layers to this case, political hurdles, just below the surface.

  LINTON KNEW THAT DAINES, as an elected official, must be acutely sensitive to the community. After all, one wrong move, and Daines could face bad press, an angry electorate, and then a motivated opponent. Simple realities. That said, Linton knew that Daines had been fair and put justice first in past dealings.

  An added wrinkle had to do with the Church. Reggie was LDS, like three-quarters of the just more than one hundred thousand residents of the county. That didn’t mean that the prosecutors gave breaks to members of the Church. They had plenty of prosecutions to show otherwise. Terryl herself, after all, had gone after a bishop years ago.

  At the same time, Reggie wasn’t just a member of the Church, he was a poster child for many of its best-regarded attributes: clean-cut, churchgoing, family-focused, committed to going on a mission. He was an athlete and a decent student, things people in this county wanted their kids to be. He looked nice. He was nice.

  As Linton was on his way to go talk to Daines, these things percolated. “This kid was on an LDS mission, and that is highly regarded in this valley. We knew we’d have to pull him off the mission,” he recalls. “The political ramifications were very high.”

  Linton felt the science was so clear that it trumped any unstated risk from Reggie’s Church ties. But then, Linton also had a secret reason for looking a bit differently upon the influence of the Church.

  BORN ON A FARM in Utah, Linton came from a family without much education. Initially, they made ends meet in part by selling off plots of their twenty-six acres where they’d raised animals and had some orchards. Dirt poor.

  Eventually, they parted with all the land and moved to the outskirts of Salt Lake City, to a poor neighborhood. Linton started to run with a rough crowd. In high school, he had a friend die of a meth overdose, and his best friend was a drug dealer—meth, marijuana, quaaludes, but mostly LSD. He once spiked Don’s drink with LSD, leading to a horrible trip that left Don curled up in the corner of his bedroom, afraid he was going to fall through the floor. This was the late sixties.

  Linton didn’t make a habit of it. His dad told him: If you ever start taking drugs, or drinking, don’t com
e home.

  He respected his father; his dad had those big biceps. But he didn’t fear he’d get beaten or anything like that. The family had a heritage of not drinking, and a religious faith. But when it came to the Church, Linton was being told one thing while having a very different kind of experience.

  IT HAPPENED THE FIRST time in the church, in an isolated area. The perpetrator was a well-regarded church member. Linton was seven. He remembers the man putting a hand down his pants, and fondling him. From that point on, for three years, the man used his position and good reputation to groom Linton, isolate him, intensifying the abuse. He manipulated Linton’s family into allowing him to spend private time with the boy, even overnights at the man’s house.

  Linton didn’t tell anyone; he felt he shouldn’t. He couldn’t make sense of any of it, this terrible shameful thing being done to him by an authority figure, someone, no less, so well regarded in the church. Linton felt he must’ve done something wrong. “I felt God had deserted me and I couldn’t figure out why because I’d been such a good kid.”

  The experience made a profound impression on him that led him to think twice about the difference between spirituality and religion, between faith and the institutions that deliver its message.

  At least that’s how he came to terms with all of this later on, in a rational way. At the time, he couldn’t make sense of his life, of the role in it of such a prominent authority that he couldn’t trust. He got depressed. He heard voices. He went on antipsychotic medications.

  One thing that helped Linton find his way was music. In the fourth grade, the music instructor told Linton he ought to play the violin. He went home and his dad said: No son of mine is going to play violin. So the family rented him a saxophone, and he took right to it.