Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
This perspective in general—the lack of concern among many parents to the explosion of screens and screen time—drove, to some extent, an interesting change in policy in 2011 from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Recall that, in 1999, when Terryl had cut her cable television, the pediatric organization had called on families to prevent children under two from watching any television.
But in 2011, the group liberalized its policy, urging parents to limit and monitor toddler screen time but not calling for such a rigid ban. Between 1999 and 2011, the research had begun to mount and solidify about the risks of heavy screen time, but the pediatric association felt it needed to be realistic, as Dr. Ari Brown, an author of the revised policy told the
New York Times
.
“We felt it was time to revisit this issue because screens are everywhere now, and the message is much more relevant than it was a decade ago,” Dr. Brown told the paper, which went on to write: “Dr. Brown said the new policy was less restrictive because ‘the Academy took a lot of flak for the first one, from industry, and even from pediatricians, asking, “What planet do you live on?” ’ ”
ON THE PERSONAL FRONT
, Terryl and her family were enjoying more good fortune during the first half of 2008. In the spring, Taylor and Jayme had jointly entered the National History Fair with an exhibit on a writer named Malika Oufkir—the daughter of a Moroccan general—who was imprisoned for years in brutal conditions. She went on to become a rallying point for prisoner’s rights, and the subject of an exhibit by the Warner daughters that won the school, regional, and state competitions, meaning that, for the second year in a row, the clan went to the nationals.
Of course, there continued to be occasional downsides to Terryl’s optimism, pep, and conviction that she’d do anything to connect with her children in a way she hadn’t felt connected to as a child. Terryl could overcompensate with the passion of a convert. It happened again in May of 2008, when Taylor and Jayme got a zip line, which was a wire you attached across an open space, like a yard, suspended from two high points. Then you’d slide down the wire holding on to an attached handle.
Jayme and Taylor built the line in the backyard. But it looked like it might be dangerous. Jayme took a try and narrowly avoided a crash landing. Taylor was too scared to try it. “Oh, c’mon, you guys, I’ll do it!” said Terryl.
She jumped off the deck, and, halfway across the yard, slammed into a planter box. Terryl broke her ankle. “I was laughing and crying at the same time.”
“My mom has an extreme sense of enthusiasm,” Jayme says. “She’s willing to do or try anything.”
D
URING THE FIRST HALF
of 2008, as the legal drama hummed in the background, Reggie remained folded in on himself. He lived with his folks, staying in his childhood room. He detailed cars and was the assistant coach on the sophomore basketball team. He dated a bit. And he ran, lots of running, pretty much daily, often a loop of seven or eight miles that took him from the house to the McDonald’s. On an early MP3 player, he listened to rap and hip-hop.
It let him push down the guilt and fear. “It was the only thing that kept me sane.” It let him keep at bay, in particular, the terror that he’d wind up in jail, and the television-inspired nighmares of what it would be like, the idea he’d have to fight. He’d had a few scuffles before in high school, glorified shoving matches between his group, the jocks, and the cowboys. He’d have regular visions of the door to the jail shutting behind him.
He did something he didn’t do much before in his life: get angry with his mom. At some point in virtually every day, she’d ask how he was feeling or say, “I talked to Jon today,” referring to Bunderson, or “The next time we go to court is . . .” Reggie would tell her he didn’t want to talk about it, or be dismissive, and his disrespect for her would add half a teaspoon more of shame.
In March, Reggie decided to change his circumstances. He made up his mind that he would move to Salt Lake City and attend Salt Lake Community College. He found a job working twenty to thirty hours per week, earning $8.50 an hour, for the Salt Lake Bees, a minor league baseball team. To trek back and forth to Tremonton, and around Salt Lake, he spent $3,200 on a 2003 Chevy Cavalier. He bought the car entirely on credit, with payments of $75 a month.
ON APRIL 15, THERE
was a court hearing that started with a request from Bunderson that the state of Utah pay for Reggie’s defense to hire expert witnesses.
Bunderson argued that Reggie was indigent, broke. This led to a relatively spirited back-and-forth between Bunderson and Linton, with Reggie taking the stand at one point. He answered questions from Linton and Judge Willmore in clipped language, polite on its face, but distant and just shy of hostile. On the stand in jacket and tie, his head seemed to hang heavy, even his eyelids hung, as if whatever was inside of his brain—unspoken thoughts and emotions—were casting a shadow over the witness box.
Linton and Judge Willmore pressed him on whether he could be indigent if he just bought the Chevy Cavalier. They asked what he’d done with the $7,500 or so his records showed he’d earned since getting back from his mission. Gas, he said, going out to eat, and dates. He said he had a savings of $90.
Judge Willmore pressed him on who would pay for college and when tuition was due.
“I ain’t sure when the deadline is for tuition,” Reggie responded.
In the end, Judge Willmore decided to have the defense and state split the cost of the witnesses.
There were larger issues betrayed by the testimony that day. Reggie’s lack of emotion, appearing as arrogance or even hostility, fueled the prosecution. Linton’s polite but point-by-point challenges, while typical of a litigious process, fueled Reggie’s team’s sense of indignation and martyrdom. The legal game was on now, taking on its own life.
Relations between Linton and Bunderson had frayed. Reggie and his team felt there was no basis for these charges—texting hadn’t caused this wreck and, regardless, it couldn’t be proved. This was an accident and a witch hunt; the prosecution felt the defense had insulated itself from science and reality. It was a real, honest, deep-seated divide.
Each side wanted to win and felt it deserved to. But neither wanted to risk losing. This was of course characteristic of any criminal trial—any time there were questions of jail time, reputation, money. But the prospect of losing took on an added edge for each side: for Linton and the county because some people—including colleagues in his own office—couldn’t believe they’d ever wasted time and money with this unprecedented case; and for Reggie’s side because he’d tenaciously denied any wrongdoing. Were he to lose, it felt like it would be shame piled on shame in the community.
With all this at stake, could there be a practical way out that let each side claim some victory? Just about the time of the April hearing, the county attorney, George Daines, reached out to Bunderson to talk about the possibility of a plea bargain. Again, this wasn’t at all uncharacteristic of criminal cases.
There was one new bit of evidence that did give Linton and Terryl reason to dig in their heels. Four days before the hearing, they’d received the results from a study done by a forensic sciences firm in Salt Lake City that had asked the question: Was it likely that Reggie had hydroplaned?
The company investigator, Scott Kimbrough, concluded that, no, Reggie had not hydroplaned. “It is extremely unlikely that Reggie Shaw’s vehicle hydroplaned. As his vehicle drifted across the center of the road, his wheels would have traveled over roughly textured asphalt that sat above the slight depressions of the wheel paths in the center of the travel land and would have been well drained,” the memo from the investigator read in its concluding section. It noted that there was only “scattered rain” at the time of the accident.
The “dynamics of the vehicles involved in the accident strongly indicate that the vehicles had much higher levels of traction than would be available in a hydroplaning situation.”
THE DAY AFTER THE
April 15 hearing, Bunderson wrote a memo following a long conversation with a local lay official in the Mormon Church, Rod Merrell, who was the president of the Shaws’ region. The conversation had to do with whether Reggie could complete his mission, still his stated dream.
Merrell referred Bunderson to Terry Johnson, who worked in the field for the Canada-Winnipeg mission. Bunderson called Johnson, who told the lawyer that this was the sort of case that would need to be reviewed at a high level of the Church, the Counsel of the Seventy or even the Counsel of the Twelve, otherwise known as the Apostles.
“There are no real hard and fast rules,” Bunderson wrote in his internal memo. Reggie’s ability to start a new mission, would be “a function of the type of crime, so I believe that if he is convicted of a lesser offense that would be helpful.”
REGGIE LEFT FOR SALT
Lake City. He lived in a spare bedroom with the family of a friend he’d made during his year in college in Virginia. Bunderson sent a letter on June 16 saying that he’d had several conversations with George Daines, “for the purposes of discussing a possible resolution in the case.”
Reggie worked for the Bees and took classes, thinking he might study English. He met a young lady named Elise and they chatted on Facebook and hung out a bit. He met another young lady named Nikki.
Jackie, meanwhile, got closer with Gary, who came for that weeklong visit in June. Leila made salads and read and watched television. For the Shaws, the legal bills crept up.
IN JUNE, JUDGE WILLMORE
ruled on several of the motions that were discussed in the April 15 hearing. On the question of who would pay for Reggie’s expert witnesses, Judge Willmore ruled that the state and Reggie could split the cost.
On the much more significant question about whether Trooper Rindlisbacher could be allowed to testify about his conversation with Reggie, the judge found the testimony could be allowed. He ruled that Rindlisbacher didn’t have Reggie in custody and wasn’t interrogating the young man in a way that would require a Miranda warning.
He wrote that the conversation was friendly and that Reggie had gone voluntarily into Rindlisbacher’s car. “Defendant was not frisked or handcuffed and the tone of the conversation was cordial,” Judge Willmore wrote. “No evidence was presented to the court that indicates Defendant felt like he was not free to leave.”
This was a big one in the favor of Linton and the prosecution. If Rindlisbacher was free to testify then Bunderson would face a tough call as to whether to put Reggie on the stand, a proposition the defense attorney thought was fraught with peril.
At the time, the judge didn’t issue a ruling about the other big issue, about Dr. Strayer’s testimony. That would require deeper thought, and another hearing.
IN AUGUST, BUNDERSON WROTE
Reggie for the first time with specifics of a possible plea, or, rather, of the offer from the county. It entailed Reggie pleading to two counts of negligent homicide, both class A misdemeanors. Reggie would be required to serve thirty to ninety days in jail, “watch a video of one of the deceased person’s lives,” and “for a period of six months they want to use you as a poster boy” for deterrence on texting and driving.
There was one thing Bunderson liked about the deal: It would be a plea of abeyance, a term of art that means the charges would be dismissed, removed from the record, if Reggie met the conditions of the sentence.
Still, Bunderson concluded, “I don’t expect you to find this what you want, but we do need to consider it as a settlement and discuss it thoroughly.”
ON SEPTEMBER
23, 2008, in Florida, half a country away, another tragedy occurred: A driver of a semi carrying a delivery to Home Depot slammed into the back of a school bus that had stopped to let children off. The bus had its warning lights on and its signs out, alerting drivers it had stopped.
The crumpled bus started to burn. Trapped inside was thirteen-year-old Frances Margay Schee. She died in the flames.
The semi driver said he never saw the bus. He told investigators he had been on the phone.
IN THE FALL, THE
season ended for the Salt Lake Bees. Reggie got a job with the National Basketball Association’s Utah Jazz, taking drink orders in a fancy club at the arena.
Then, in September and October, there were more developments on the legal and personal front that underscored the numbing effect, the purgatory.
On September 29, Bunderson wrote Daines to put in writing the proposed settlement that had been the product of ongoing conversations. It was much as Bunderson had described it to Reggie in August, but there was an important caveat to the plea in abeyance. They would get Judge Willmore to agree to “hold the guilty plea in a confidential file so it doesn’t get recorded anywhere.” This was aimed at maintaining Reggie’s reputation and paving his path to return on a mission. It was intended to draw as little attention as possible to what happened on the morning of September 22, 2006.
This more serious discussion of settlement reflected the reality that an actual trial was quickly approaching. It was only prudent to take these steps. It also reflected, though, that Reggie’s will seemed to be wilting, something that was tough to put a finger on—he never said “I did it”—but the fight seemed to be going out of him bit by bit.
THINGS WITH NIKKI DIDN’T
work out. Reggie couldn’t really open himself up. He wanted to, wanted to connect, but he was holding so much back. He talked about the accident in a distant way. Then there was Elise, the woman he’d met in the summer. She was blond and Reggie found her very attractive. They’d stayed in touch on Facebook. He asked her out again in October.
For their second date, he planned to take her to Bonwood Bowl, a bowling alley with a lounge and café on South Main Street in Salt Lake City, and then to a drive-in movie. He went to Elise’s house to pick her up.