Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
A FEW DAYS LATER
, Leila mustered the courage to return to the scene of the accident. It was a beautiful day, midmorning. She pulled onto a side road, not far from the wreck site, that led to a gun range. Most of the accident debris had been cleared away, but signs of violence remained: blue paint from Jim’s car on a bent post on the right side of the road; fragments of glass and taillights in the gully where the car came to rest; skid marks.
Leila, though somewhat in a daze, noticed something else: There was no shoulder on the road, no easy place for her to walk; no room for the cars to safely swerve. It seemed dangerous to her, even if she didn’t quite put so fine a point on her observation. Just a passing thought.
She started to sob.
A man in a sedan pulled over.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t, of course. A few days later, on October 19, she woke up vomiting. She was so weak she could barely get to the door to open it for her daughter, who took Leila to the emergency room at Cache Valley Specialty Hospital. It didn’t seem like the flu or any obvious bug. It was grief. Leila was having trouble standing up. In the emergency room, they used an IV to give her five liters of saline.
A WEEK OR SO
later, Jackie Furfaro, Jim’s widow, took her own symbolic, difficult step. She revived Moonrise, a night elf hunter.
To do so meant going down to the basement and turning on one of the two personal computers, hers. The other of the pair belonged to Jim, and the couple often used them in tandem to play World of Warcraft together. Jim’s chief character was Twinger, a gnome mage. Jackie favored Moonrise.
In the game, even as they sat at different computers, they palled around, hanging out mostly together, going on virtual quests. Jackie had now returned alone, seeking comfort in the virtual world.
Not long after Jackie logged on that night, she got a “whisper”—a message from another player. It was from Gary Maloney, an old friend of Jackie and Jim’s from the Colorado School of Mines. He’d been Jim’s best man. In the game that night, he was a human mage, a wizard; in the real world, he worked at a motorcycle repair shop in Indiana.
He asked how Jackie was doing.
Not great. But she wasn’t telling people that. She was still grieving in her private moments, in the shower, late at night, or in the morning. She was becoming resolute that Jim, who had such a zest for life, would’ve wanted her to forge ahead.
That night, in World of Warcraft, her natural first reaction was to ask how Gary was doing with Jim’s death. Then, for whatever reason, she let down her guard a touch.
“I’m feeling alone,” she recalls writing to him. “I’m having a hard time doing it all.”
Gary wrote back: “You are not alone.”
A part of her, the engineer side, was still looking for some explanation; was there anything Jim could’ve done to avoid the wreck? Could he have swerved?
And adding to her irritation was the suggestion—the insane proposition—that somehow Jim had been at fault. That’s an idea that came to her a week or so earlier when she’d gotten a visit from a local sheriff, Sergeant Tony Hudson. He was helping Trooper Rindlisbacher on the case.
Jackie had called the sheriff’s office because she needed a copy of the police report from the accident to process Jim’s life insurance policy. “Of course, come by and pick it up,” they’d said. But to get to the office meant she’d have to drive on Valley View Drive, and Jackie, as much as she was determined to move ahead with her life, wasn’t ready to drive past the place where her “first true love” had taken his last breath.
Sergeant Hudson was sympathetic and agreed to bring the accident report to Jackie’s office at Utah State. As he handed the document to her, Hudson told Jackie that Reggie Shaw had “lawyered up.” And, moreover, he said Reggie seemed to suggest that it might’ve been Jim who had been the one who crossed the yellow divider. Something was starting to smolder inside her—why couldn’t Reggie just call and say he was sorry?
A
LOCAL POLICE DETECTIVE
named Mark Robinson lived in Rindlisbacher’s neighborhood. A few days after the accident, he’d gotten a call from the trooper.
“Hey, Mark, can I trouble you with a question?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“How do I subpoena cell phone records?”
“I can help you. But it’s a pain. Why?”
“I’m working a fatality. I think the driver who caused it was texting.”
“It can be done. It’s not easy.”
RINDLISBACHER’S JOB WAS SUPPOSED
to be finished at this point. When cases went a little cold, or were going to take time from a trooper’s day job, they got passed along to a full-time investigator. In this case, the investigator was a guy named Stan Olsen.
According to a memo that Bunderson, Reggie’s attorney, wrote to himself, Olsen called him on October 25. Bunderson confirmed he was representing Reggie and that his client would not be talking to law enforcement.
The memo reads: “Olsen seemed fine with that, but he did say that the trooper is really pushing the matter.”
BUNDERSON HAD ASKED THE
Shaws if Reggie was texting. Reggie had told his mother he wasn’t on the phone. He seemed sure of that. That’s what she told Bunderson. Per Bunderson’s request, she got a copy of the phone bill. It was early November.
The bill wasn’t easy to parse. There were four phones attached to the account. As she read the bill, though, there didn’t appear to be any records of the texts. The bill seemed only to include phone records. She took that as evidence that there hadn’t been any texts.
This looks okay
, she thought.
“We didn’t really question whether this was all of the bill,” she says in retrospect. And, she adds, there wasn’t much critical questioning of Reggie on her part.
She gave the bill to Bunderson. He didn’t note any problems with it. She was mollified, mostly.
“You want to trust your kids,” she says, looking back.
Ed, on the other hand, couldn’t stop worrying, though he didn’t say it aloud. He kept waiting for another shoe to drop. He just knew it was out there.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE
Thanksgiving, Rindlisbacher visited the stately Cache County Attorney’s Office on Main Street. The trooper had come to see one of the seven county attorneys, a guy named Tony C. Baird. The trooper found Baird standing near the reception area, glancing at some paperwork.
“Hey, Tony. Can I chat with you for a second?”
Baird led Rindlisbacher through the frosted glass door into his office. The pair stood and chatted beside two armchairs, beneath one of the dark wooden arches that are found throughout the grand building.
Baird was around five foot seven and trim but muscular, with the body of a fitness devotee, short hair, a square jaw, and almost preternaturally straight teeth. He had an all-American face that only slightly betrayed the man’s competitive nature. An opposing counsel or a defendant might be rightfully wary that Baird could be a tough foe if provoked.
Baird wore his standard fare, a black suit and white shirt he got from a department store. It was a lot fancier than his father imagined, even hoped, that Baird would wear to work.
Baird had been groomed to take over the family dairy farm, located in Lewiston, a small farming town on the border of Utah and Idaho. “Dad threatened me with taking over the family farm, so I decided I’d try some of that college stuff,” explains Baird. He went to Utah State. Then his dad tried to get him to come back to the farm. “So I decided to try some of that law school stuff.”
After graduating from BYU law school, he worked in several county attorney’s offices in the state, spent a year as the Logan city prosecutor, and in 1997, he joined the Cache County office. By 2006, he was chief criminal deputy.
Baird, who got up regularly at 4:30 a.m. to train for triathlons, could appreciate Trooper Rindlisbacher’s tenacity. “He had a bit of a reputation,” Baird said. He’d heard that from Rindlisbacher himself. “He kind of goes after people.
“But I wouldn’t have characterized it as overzealous.”
That morning in late November, Rindlisbacher arrived with a common request: court approval to further investigate the Shaw accident. Specifically, he wanted to subpoena Reggie’s phone records. He briefed Baird on the case and added that he’d seen Reggie texting in the police car on the way to the hospital. Rindlisbacher said he thought Reggie was lying.
Baird took it in. If the request for subpoena power was commonplace, the circumstances were not. Texting and driving? Sure, he’d heard a bit about it here or there, but never in the legal context.
“It wasn’t something that had ever come across my desk. It wasn’t something we’d ever looked at before,” he says. He thought Rindlisbacher’s focus on the issue was “interesting,” a word that almost seems to suggest that it was a bit of a wild-goose chase. Baird wondered:
Is there even any law on the books that would allow us to pursue this case?
His gut instinct was that this case wouldn’t go anywhere. But Baird liked Rindlisbacher. And, besides, the legal standard for getting the court to allow the subpoena wasn’t particularly high. It was “good cause,” less than “probable cause,” a standard aimed at allowing the police to pursue the next level of investigation.
Sure, Baird told Rindlisbacher. He asked the trooper to get together the affidavit facts to be submitted with the request to the court.
Rindlisbacher was going to get his phone records—and, he hoped, his proof.
A
S IN SO MANY
other fields, the study of attention broadened and deepened as the twentieth century sped along. And much of the gain owed to technology. Using emerging high-tech techniques, researchers pieced together the physical structures, down to the cellular level, involved with attention. Some of these developments were succinctly summarized in a book by Dr. Posner, the contemporary legend from the University of Oregon.
In the 1970s, for instance, researchers used microelectrodes to hone in on a key part of the brain—called the parietal lobe—crucial to shifts in attention. In fact, as Dr. Posner would later help discover, patients with lesions to this part of the brain had more trouble shifting attention.
Use of electrodes also allowed researchers to measure the time that it takes the brain to reallocate resources when attention shifts. Say someone saw a flash of light. About one hundred milliseconds after the introduction of this new visual stimulation, the person showed changes at the neurological level. Measures like these added precision to the understanding of how long it takes the brain to react, findings that were very much in the spirit of Helmholtz and mental chronometry, the study of brain structures.
In the ensuing years, better technology meant better imaging—positron emission tomography (PET) scans, MRIs, fMRIs, EEGs. The technology allowed researchers to examine finer slices of the neurological networks, their sum and their parts. The network included parts of the brain like the anterior cingulate cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and, crucially, the prefrontal cortex. These areas would show changes—like increases and decreases in blood flow—when study subjects were trying to focus on something, or when they were overwhelmed with information, putting intensified pressure on the attention networks.
In Dr. Posner’s book,
Attention in a Social World
, he writes that “it is now possible to view attention much more concretely as an organ system, with its own functional anatomy.”
Scientists learned more about the capacities and limitations of vision, hearing, reaction time, the networks and parts of the brain most central to attention (and, in turn, to learning) and working memory—the short-term store of memory that people call upon as they maneuver through life. They broke attention down to component parts, or subnetworks, that are somewhat independent but not mutually exclusive: how you can control attention, how you sustain it, how you gather information and put it to use, how you inhibit interruption and keep out irrelevant information. And they began to understand the neural basis of the activity. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers, working largely with monkeys, identified a powerful, multifunctional type of neuron in the prefrontal cortex. These executive control neurons, unlike many other specialized neurons in more primitive parts of the brain (a neuron in the visual cortex, for instance, might have the singular role of identifying the color red) seem to have the function of bringing together lots of information from disparate parts of the brain and organizing them, helping set direction, goal, and focus.
At Princeton, researchers used imaging techniques in monkeys and humans to validate and further the understanding of what happens when the brain is asked to consider two different sources of information. When this happens, it appears to create a state of competition inside the brain. The source of visual stimulation that is most relevant to the person gets the lion’s share of the neurological resources. At the same time, as more neurological resources are put to attending to this “relevant” information, there appears to be a decline in the neurological resources put toward attending to the “less relevant” information. That might sound obvious. But the implications are significant. The research gets close to answering a very crucial question, particularly for the digital era: When a person is paying attention to one thing, do they
automatically
ignore other things, or is there a mechanism for allowing the person to modulate or control how much attention they pay to the other source of stimulation?
A hypothesis born out of the Princeton work is that attention is a finite resource: Focusing on one source (a person, a mobile device, the road ahead of you, etc.) comes at the cost of lost awareness of everything else. If that hypothesis holds, we face real challenges when we focus on a phone while driving; we can’t just will ourselves to concentrate on both things because our brains are designed to put a huge emphasis on what we deem relevant information, to the point of suppressing brain activity devoted to something else.