Deadly distractions

Your brain can’t do two things at once. Reggie Shaw, a kind, gentle, 19-year-old college student who dreamed of going on a Mormon mission, learned this in the most horrific and tragic way possible when his car crossed the center line and struck and killed two rocket scientists. Reggie was texting while driving.

A terrible mistake, a senseless accident, but really, Couldn’t this have happened to anyone? wondered his family and friends. At the time of the accident - September, 2006 - the dangers of distracted driving were still hazy territory both legally and in public perception. The prosecutor and victim’s advocate, however, saw things clearly: Reggie didn’t just make a mistake when he sent text after text while driving that fateful morning, he committed a crime. He needed to pay.

Initially Reggie denied his culpability, claiming his car hydroplaned on the wet mountain roads and even if he was texting, it wasn’t at the exact moment of the crash; then during testimony from an expert witness on attention and multitasking, Reggie had an epiphany: the accident was “one hundred percent preventable” his texting had killed two loving husbands, beloved fathers, valued coworkers.

Now, instead of the Mormon mission he always hoped for, Reggie undertook a different mission, a heartfelt mea culpa to inform the public of the deadly consequences of texting while driving. Matt Richtel’s A Deadly Wandering is a true account not only of Reggie’s very human story but also of the developing scientific research on human attention and technology.