Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
“On my sentencing day, the last day of court, the families got a chance to speak to me, to address me. One of the men has a young daughter, about my age, and she gets up and talks about how she’d just gotten married and she talks about her wedding and she talks about how her father was not there to walk her down the aisle.” Reggie sniffles. “She turns to me, and she looks me right in the eye, and she says: ‘Because you took that away from me.’ She was absolutely right. I wanted to text and drive, and I took that opportunity away from her, to have that with her father. I was thinking, at the time of the accident, I was only thinking about that message. I want you to think about every single message you’ve ever sent or received. Is there any one message you’d take your life or someone else’s life for? Absolutely not. It’s been almost eight years since that accident happened. It is difficult for me every single day. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about that accident and say to myself: ‘I wish I could go back and change what happened.’ I go to bed every night, and look at myself in the mirror every morning, knowing I caused an accident that was one hundred percent preventable. I took two great men’s lives.”
Reggie’s words aren’t ornate or filled with rhetorical flourish. Their power, building and building, comes from grief. It is changing the physical surroundings, now threatening to swallow the auditorium. Reggie’s choking it back, straining to hold it. Students lean forward, a few blink tears.
“I only spent thirty days in jail. People ask: ‘Do you feel like that’s enough time—for what you did?’ I don’t know. Still to this day, I think about that question. I don’t know.” Reggie stands up a bit straighter, takes a deep breath. This part he can handle. He tells them about the first three nights and four full days in twenty-four-hour lockdown. He tells them how he slept on a “boat,” which is a small blue bed, an inch and a half thick, because the jail was overcrowded and the bunks were taken by his cellmates. “They throw it on the floor and hand me a thin blanket, shove me in, and shut the door and say good luck.”
For the first four days, he explains, he sat on the cement floor twenty-three hours a day. Then he got his bunk. His cellmate was being held awaiting transfer to the state penitentiary for nearly beating his girlfriend to death. Reggie’s holding the microphone with both hands.
“The thing about jail is nobody cares about you. Nobody liked me there. They called me the ‘Textual Offender.’ I go back to that question,” he says, referring to whether he spent enough time in jail for his crime. “I don’t know. One thing I can tell you: If I could go back and spend the rest of my life in jail to save those two men’s lives, I would do it, in a heartbeat. I would live there every single day of my life rather than take two men’s lives.”
Now he’s crying.
“I’m here for one reason. That’s for you guys to look at me—” Reggie’s choking back tears. He can’t talk. He fights to finish the sentence. “And say: ‘I don’t want to be that guy.’ ”
There’s just Reggie now, and his grief, five hundred students absorbed in it. He continues about how he doesn’t want them to be him.
“ ‘I don’t want to put people through what he’s put people through. I don’t want to go through what he went through.’ I can promise. I can promise you . . .” He starts to regain himself. “When you get behind the wheel of a car, that is not the time to make phone calls, to send text messages. Your friends can wait, your family can wait.
“Driving in the car, you thought a text was more important than their son or daughter. It is not worth it. It is not worth it. Please make a pledge with me today. Help me out. Please put your cell phones away when driving. Turn them off and put them away. You’re going to save somebody’s life.”
Reggie takes a deep breath, a wind-down breath. Then, he just sums up, “I’d love to answer your questions. I’m very open about my story. Nothing crosses the line with me.”
Applause rings out, and then it’s done. Students file out, but a handful come to the front to thank Reggie.
“That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen,” says Nate Christensen, seventeen, a senior, wearing black shorts and a red T-shirt and a diamond stud in his ear. “I’ve done it,” he says of texting. “I really didn’t think it was a big issue. I looked up every few seconds and figured I’d be all right. That’s obviously not the case.”
RORY SPARROW, THE NBA
player’s rep, had characterized Reggie as “reliving” the experience every time he tells it. The NBA invites him back each year. He’s spoken to the Detroit Lions football team, and gives a regular presentation to the top high school basketball players in the world when they gather at national clinics.
Sparrow says: “I’m not going to be so naive and say no one in the group ever texts and drives, but Reggie definitely changed attitudes.”
Reggie has engendered respect, even from those who once fought him.
Linton: “I have never seen anybody try to redeem themselves as much as Reggie Shaw. Period. End of story.”
Judge Willmore: “He’s done more to affect change than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
By 2013, Reggie had spoken at some forty different events for Zero Fatalities, the public safety group in Utah. Brent Wilhite, a program manager with the group, says it relies on people like Reggie who have been involved in accidents to put a human face on issues. But Reggie, in his own way, stands apart. “We’ve worked with people convicted of dangerous driving behaviors and they’ve been great ambassadors, but no one else has had the long-term commitment and passion as Reggie. He’s gone so far above and beyond.”
Wilhite says Reggie is good with an audience because he seems like an ordinary guy, the person who could be your friend or son, your boyfriend.
When it comes to finding a messenger, “we can’t find anybody like Reggie.”
Secretary LaHood, who in his four-and-a-half-year tenure as the nation’s chief transportation authority, came across many harrowing tales and difficult safety issues. He says Reggie has really struck him with his commitment and testimony. The secretary invited Reggie to speak at his second federal summit, and then heard him at regional summits in Florida, Texas, and Illinois.
“He’s a hero,” Secretary LaHood says. “He bears his soul, he admits his guilt, and he tries to use that to persuade others to do right.
“Reggie has had a tremendous impact on people’s thinking about distracted driving.”
One could make a strong case that no single person has made as much of a difference when it comes to sending the message about the risks of texting and driving. Policy makers, like Secretary LaHood, who made driver distraction a national priority, certainly have had a huge impact. So have the early researchers, like Dr. Strayer, who were often sailing against headwinds generated by the corporations and profiteers benefiting from connected drivers. Among those three hundred people gathered at the distracted-driving summit, there were vigorous voices of people who lost family members, who created MADD-like groups to take on distraction.
But Reggie stands alone for changing a state law, taking his message nationally, showing relentless courage, putting himself, personally, on the line, to try to connect with the vulnerable age group of teen and young drivers.
Stephen Clark, the legislator who brought the bill to ban texting to the Utah House, eventually was honored by being named an LDS mission president in Missouri. His life now revolves around counseling young people and helping them digest their issues. He thinks Reggie has fulfilled a mission as great as any he could’ve aspired to through church work.
“If I was Reggie’s mission president, and I was sitting across the table from him, I’d tell him: Your mission started the day you made that bad choice and caused that horrific accident. You started on your mission and you battled through the many, many challenges, the ups and downs, and you have been tried and tested and you have done all you can to make it right, and you have blessed the lives of many others who could be in the same position you are. Because of your willingness to stand forward and say ‘I made a mistake,’ you have fulfilled your mission in life. It was to tell the world that texting and driving is deadly. That’s the missionary you have been.”
He adds: “I believe Reggie has suffered enough. He needs to be able to forget it and move on.”
I relayed this to Reggie as part of a long conversation we had on how he might be able to move on. When he heard what Clark said, Reggie started to cry. “Do I deserve it? Do I deserve to feel okay? What if I stop talking and making presentations and I feel better, or don’t feel better, and then one day I wake up and read a story about someone who died texting and driving and I know I could’ve done something to stop it?”
That seemed to be the hardest part. Could Reggie move on? Would he allow himself to? Should he?
AND THERE WAS ANOTHER
question. Reggie’s many fans described him as a perfect spokesman because he is just a regular guy. Is he? Could any of us have done what Reggie did? Or was he more or less predisposed than the rest of us to lose his focus, take his eyes from the road, fiddle with his phone?
The increasingly sophisticated tools of neuroscience have something pointed to say about that.
A
S I WAS GETTING
to know Dr. Gazzaley in the spring of 2013, we sat down for lunch in the cafeteria at the UCSF campus where he has his offices. I told him about the accident and Reggie’s story. Dr. Gazzaley listened quietly as he dug into a chopped salad.
I said I had a question for him: “Can I show you Reggie’s brain?”
At first, he seemed a little taken aback.
“Sure,” he said. Dr. Gazzaley’s up for anything. Then he added: “He’s just a regular guy, isn’t he?”
Precisely what I was trying to find out.
BACK IN UTAH, DR.
Strayer and a colleague named Jason Watson had been using advanced technologies like the MRI to look at attention from inside the brain. What networks are involved? What does distraction look like? While others in the field had been doing this as well, their work was more unusual in that it was part of a larger body of research aimed at exploring whether there are people who are particularly good at managing the onslaught of information. In other words, who can “multitask” better than other people? Are there people who are worse?
Where did Reggie fit into the spectrum?
If, after all, he was an outlier, someone with a predisposition to distraction, it would be worth knowing. For instance, was there some signature on his brain of the concussions he sustained playing high school sports? Was there something odd in the way he processed information? Was he more likely to text and drive than the rest of us, or, when texting and driving, to be less able somehow to juggle the tasks?
In early April 2013, I drove with Reggie from downtown Salt Lake City to the University of Utah’s neuroimaging center. The drive took us up I-15, the same route he’d driven with his parents when he came home from his first mission. Then we took the 600 South exit, heading east, in moderate, midafternoon traffic. Reggie said he was nervous, the idea of getting into the tube, having his head examined. Would they find something wrong?
On the other hand, this was the Reggie I’d come to know. He would turn down virtually no request that helped illuminate texting and driving—or its risks.
We almost didn’t get to find out about Reggie’s brain, at least not on that day. We almost wrecked instead.
Reggie was piloting his 2007 gold Mazda in the far right lane. In the lane to our immediate left was a sedan. In front of us, there was a pickup truck carrying stacks of folding chairs, the kind you put outside for a backyard barbecue on a sunny day, like this one. The chairs came loose from their bundle. We could not have been more than one hundred yards away, when the chairs began falling into our lane, setting up imminent impact. I looked quickly to the right, to the shoulder, but one of the chairs had fallen in that direction. To the left, the sedan had us boxed in.
I felt instant terror. I flashed on my kids and the idea that we would hit the chairs and start spinning around the highway, and I braced for impact. Reggie swerved left, narrowly missing two chairs rolling our way and sending us toward the sedan. Reggie veered smoothly back to the right, missing by a few feet the sedan, which was now just half a car length ahead of us. It was that close. Had Reggie not had his complete focus on the road, had he been lost for a millisecond, we’d certainly have crashed.
A few minutes later, dosed with perspective, we arrived at the neuroimaging center in a nondescript industrial park. Dr. Watson and Dr. Strayer were there to greet us. They walked us through the procedure. They’d take two kinds of pictures of Reggie’s brain. One would be MRI images that would show us the structure of his brain. They’d also take fMRI, functional MRI images—so-called real-time MRI—which would measure blood flow changes as Reggie engaged in different behaviors. Specifically, they were going to watch what happened as Reggie tried to juggle tasks.
But before they did that, they wanted to know whether Reggie was the sort of person who was good at focusing and attending to information. So prior to putting him in the white tube, they asked him to sit in a small, windowless office, and take a written test. It involved solving some relatively complex equations, and also trying to remember information he’d been asked to memorize a few equations prior. This let them measure not just focus, but his short-term, or working, memory. What was Reggie’s “baseline” ability to attend to information?
Then Reggie walked down the hallway, got into a medical gown, and climbed onto the MRI bed. The radiology technician made sure everything was in place. She put on his head the helmet that would allow him to see video images. She slid him into the tube.
THE FIRST RESULTS TO
come back, the easy part, were the structural images. With Reggie’s permission, Dr. Watson had sent them to Dr. Gazzaley, and he walked me through the images on his computer. It was a midsummer day, fogless. Through Dr. Gazzaley’s window, across the quad, was the new Benioff Children’s Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility funded by the largesse of Marc Benioff, who, along with his wife, gave $100 million to build the hospital from a fortune he made from his company Salesforce.com, which distributes and manages software for companies on the Internet. The convergence of technology, science, and medicine was on display everywhere you looked.