Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
For his part, Michael, Terryl’s older brother, remembers the violence starting when he was five and Terryl was four. Danny “beat on me until I was eighteen, and then one night at the wrecking yard, he was drunk and started to get violent with me and I pushed him hard (I was a bit bigger by then) . . . he said he was going to get his gun . . . I could not allow that,” Mitchell wrote in an email to Terryl, reflecting on their childhood. He wrote that he and Danny got into a terrible fight at the wrecking yard. In another email, he wrote of how Danny would tell him and Terryl he wasn’t their father. “When he was saying these things he usually had me slammed up against a wall yelling in my face with his putrid booze breath.”
ON THANKSGIVING DAY OF
Terryl’s senior year in college, she recalls that she and Kathie went for a walk on the beach. Kathie had news. Terryl’s real father had made contact, along with his new wife. The pair and Kathie had dinner. Kathie showed them pictures of Terryl and Michael. Terryl says Kathie told her that the man was curious about how the kids turned out but didn’t want to be a father to them.
Terryl was furious at her mother for showing her picture to a man who didn’t want anything to do with her.
HOW WAS SHE GOING
to escape this life? It followed her, even in her dreams. Was there a way for the bubbly and optimistic to overcome the terror and loneliness?
One thing was for sure: There would be no family for Terryl, no marriage. Earlier in her life, she’d told her diary that she was going to have a family and get married in the Mormon temple. But she’d changed her mind. She couldn’t risk putting a child through what she had experienced. There was just too much she couldn’t control.
T
ROOPER RINDLISBACHER MADE PLANS
to do follow-up interviews with Kaiserman the farrier, and with Reggie.
A few days after the accident, he called Mary Jane to set something up. It was around nine in the morning, right before she was going to go out and deliver the day’s mail.
“I don’t feel good about doing this without a lawyer,” she told Rindlisbacher.
She remembers the conversation went sharply south. “He started to accuse me about knowing something,” she says, looking back.
He asked if Reggie was texting at the time of the accident.
Mary Jane says she was offended by the substance of the accusation
—
and by the tone. Trooper Rindlisbacher was “awful,” she says. “I’ve never been treated so nasty in my life.”
She sensed a chip on his shoulder.
What’s with this guy?
It rankled Mary Jane because she had such respect for law enforcement.
As to substance, she truly believed that the accident had been caused by the weather, hydroplaning. She got off the phone in tears, “scared to death.”
Still, the two of them had managed to set a tentative plan for a follow-up interview with Reggie.
A few days later, Rindlisbacher drove to the Tremonton City offices and met with Kaiserman. The farrier went through detailed drawings of what had happened. He was upset, pained at having been part of the tragedy.
Then it was time to meet with Reggie. Rindlisbacher’s phone rang. It was an attorney hired by the Shaw family. The lawyer told him that Reggie wouldn’t be coming for an interview and that he, the lawyer, would answer all questions.
Rindlisbacher was irritated. He remembers thinking of Reggie: “He’s lawyered up, and he’s not going to say anything. He’s got something to hide.”
MARY JANE OPENED THE
bedroom door. Reggie was right there on the bed, where she had left him, facing the wall, his phone on the bed, behind him.
“Reggie.”
He half turned. It had been another restless night. He kept replaying the accident, thinking about the two dead men and their families, worrying what might happen next. His mom sat on the bed.
“I think you should go talk to someone.”
He knew what she had in mind. A counselor named Gaylyn White had an office just a few blocks away, behind the office of Russell White, Gaylin’s husband, Reggie’s dentist and a local church leader.
“No.”
“Just to get things off your chest, Reg.”
Something was obviously wrong. Two days after the wreck and Reggie had barely left his room; hadn’t left the house at all. And she didn’t know the extent of his emotions. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to go out there and live,” he says. “Not in a suicidal sense. In the sense that I didn’t deserve to enjoy my life.”
Not when those two men in the other car had no life to enjoy.
Mary Jane left. Reggie thought: Crazy people go get help. Not sane people.
Not guys’ guys. Not athletes, not in Tremonton.
“IF YOU’VE SEEN
FRIDAY
Night Lights
, that was us. Same kind of place, same kind of problems,” says Dallas Miller, Reggie’s best friend. The jocks held sway, but the focus on sports, the all-American veneer, had a dark underbelly, at least from Dallas’s perspective. A lot of drinking—weekend nights downing Keystone beer in the foothills—sometimes driving home drunk—a lot of premarital sex and a lot of pregnancy. “Not to put a bad rap on our town, but, more often than not, not everyone on the sports team was living their religion.”
It was far from everyone’s view. In Dallas’s case, he felt he was in a better position to see past the town’s facade. A rebel from his earliest days, he rejected the Church, thinking it a place for hypocrites who didn’t live the life they preached. At odds with his parents, he spent many nights on Reggie’s floor, sometimes passed out from too much drinking.
In fact, there was a decent chance he could’ve been the one who wound up involved in something tragic. But Reggie? When Dallas heard about it, he thought: “He was the last guy I’d have expected this to happen to.
“He was the kid who always made the right choices, who always did the right thing.”
Reggie could cool Dallas off. In January of their senior year in high school, Dallas, six foot two and 205 pounds, threw the ball in someone’s face during basketball practice, hitting his teammate in the head. The two squared off and a fistfight seemed imminent. “Reggie grabbed me and threw me in the locker room. We had a long talk,” Dallas recalls. He adds: “Reggie was the only person I took advice from.
“He was a listener, and after he did the listening part he would have something to say that was probably in my best interest.”
Certainly not the kind of person who would make a bad decision and kill two men. It must’ve just been a horrible accident, Dallas figured, no one in the wrong, but a tragedy nonetheless.
“I was the wild one. He was the mild one. The good listener.”
REGGIE’S FIRST AND DEEPEST
rival was his older brother Nick. People thought Reggie and Nick were twins; Reggie was big for his age, and Nick small. Sometimes they thought Reggie was actually older. They competed at everything, stoked by a culture of competition. “I used to make them fight for crackers when I babysat,” says older brother Phill, mostly joking. “Only the winner got to eat.”
They played basketball and baseball outside and football video games in the house—sitting on the floor or couch, with controllers in their hands.
They got their first console, a Nintendo Entertainment System, for Christmas in the early 1990s. It was a square gray box with rectangular controllers that featured a few simple buttons. They went at it in Tecmo Super Bowl, a football game. Reggie was little more than five years old. Several years later, the brothers moved on to a different console, the Sega Genesis. It used a 16-bit processor, which allowed double the processing capability of the 8-bit Nintendo, an early sign that the power of these machines would soar with each generation. Better graphics and sound, more complex challenges and on-screen data to juggle.
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.