A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (45 page)

“I want to help rebuild these circuits,” he says. “We can sculpt and shape the neural circuits to refine the brain. We can drastically improve people’s abilities.

“This is my dream.”

CHAPTER 50

REGGIE

I
N 2012, REGGIE STARTED
dating a woman named Britney, who was twenty-two at the time, three years younger than he. They’d been friends for a few years while they both worked for the Utah Jazz, the basketball team. By the fall, they were going out regularly—movies, bowling, miniature golf.

She knew about the accident and seemed to accept him. She had her own struggles growing up, and they felt comfortable in each other’s presence, knowing they had imperfections.

Reggie was living in an apartment complex in a busy part of Salt Lake City, surrounded by commercial strips, chain restaurants, and retailers. His second-floor, one-bedroom apartment was decorated in the way of a twenty-something male who worked a lot; frozen food in the freezer, a twin bed with a comforter he periodically took home to his mom to wash, a bookshelf with some schoolbooks and movies and video games he didn’t have time to play. In the small living room, there was a hand-me-down love seat and a chair, from a relative, and the one thing in the place that had a feel of personal touch: a poster of Muhammad Ali standing over a defeated Sonny Liston.

Reggie loved Ali’s courage and tenacity. Reggie even played around with boxing. In the fall of 2012, he fought an amateur bout in Las Vegas, which drove Mary Jane nuts. Her little guy was going to put his precious head in harm’s way?

But Reggie felt like he was trying to do some new things, live life in a more full way. He took piano lessons and had a public recital.

And work was going great. Reggie had landed a job as a manager at a basketball and fitness gym just south of Salt Lake City proper. It was a huge facility, a place for the casual workout experience, but also a facility where professional athletes—and high school and college ones—could work out, play ball, lift weights. And Reggie was running the whole show, with at least fifteen people reporting to him. He was putting to work his tenacity and work ethic, the way he always gave to his teammates growing up, and blossoming into a leader.

REGGIE DECIDED TO TAKE
a chance. On September 16, 2012, nearly six years from the day of the accident, he told Britney he had a surprise of sorts for her.

“I want to take you somewhere,” he told her.

They climbed into his Mazda. He was nervous, to say the least. They drove up I-15, passing the Wasatch, the route he’d taken when he returned from his first mission. Then they turned toward Logan, passing Chocolate Pass. By now, he’d managed the courage to pass by the accident site a few times. Now, he actually stopped.

It was around ten a.m., the sun still coming up, the skies clear, not like the morning it happened. When they got there, Reggie, for the first time, walked through what he remembered had happened, and told Britney the details he remembered, showed her where his car wound up. He was crying, and she was not. “She was strong for me,” he said.

After a while, they drove to the cemetery where Keith O’Dell was buried. Reggie and Britney sat down near the headstone and didn’t talk.

A few days later, Reggie felt like he might be turning a corner. “I think it was some closure for myself,” he says, but then he pauses. “I don’t know if that was a turning point, but I’m extremely grateful that I did it.”

The reality was that each time Reggie seemed to feel he might hit a turning point, he’d slide back. He’d have dark periods. He’d feel depressed. He wasn’t sure why he was turning back; every time he did a presentation, as his dad feared, it would bring back the terror and shame. But when he didn’t do those things, he felt guilty.

How could he stop testifying to the risks of texting and driving when someone out there might still do it, and take a life?

WHEN IT CAME TO
Reggie, Terryl was among those who felt Reggie had done enough. Only Reggie seemed to wonder.

Jackie, Megan, and even, to some extent, Leila were impressed by what he’d done. Jackie had found a new partner. Stephanie and Cassidy were doing well in school. In fact, in the fall of 2013, Cassidy skipped ahead a grade—bypassing fifth grade and going right to sixth, soaring on the strength of her math skills (not unlike her father).

Around that time, the girls and Jackie got together with Reggie and Terryl. Part of the reason was that Stephanie and Cassidy had decided to team up to enter the history fair. They chose the topic of “rights and responsibilities,” and planned to focus on the right to drive but the responsibility to do so without using a phone or texting. And they’d focus on the accident that took their dad.

They had lunch and then went to a park where the girls, including Terryl’s daughter Allyssa, played on the jungle gym. The adults chatted. Jackie told Reggie about the evolution of her feelings, about how she’d been angry, and had just wanted an apology from him or some flowers after the accident. That would’ve meant a lot. But she said she’d forgiven him. Soon Stephanie came over and said she wanted Reggie to know she was doing just fine.

“Reggie could see that we’re okay and everybody has choices to make and our choice was to move forward,” Jackie says.

She told Reggie that Jim loved life and that he would want Reggie to do the same—live life to the fullest.

MEGAN O’DELL HAD DIVORCED
her first husband and gotten remarried, but still couldn’t find a job situation she liked. She was drinking some, maybe more than some, spending hours playing video games. She and Reggie would talk regularly.

He really wanted to help reach out to her. And Terryl felt deeply for her, too. “I didn’t have a father at my wedding,” Terryl says, sympathizing. For her part, Megan wouldn’t blame Reggie for the challenges in her life.

Leila, when at her most open, mourned not just the death of Keith, the love of her life, but Keith as a conduit to the world. Leila was a loner. He gave her connection. In other words, it wasn’t just Keith she missed. It was the world.

A few months before Reggie got together with the Furfaros, in the spring of 2013, Leila expressed what for nearly seven years had been an impossible thought. She wondered if she might meet someone new. It was about needing and wanting to connect with the world. She even wondered if she might try an Internet dating site. For the most part, the idea made her feel squeamish, as it does for lots of people. But she was distantly open to the idea that the Internet, this wondrous technology, could help a loner take some baby steps to connect, even if only with a new friend. The idea wasn’t to replace Keith—not ever—just to establish some new ties with the world.

She still hadn’t met Reggie, or spoken to him.

“I don’t want to talk to him. What’s he going to tell me, that he’s sorry? That doesn’t do me any good. How is that going to change my life?”

I asked if it might change his life. And she said: “Well, right now, I’m not too worried about him.”

In the case of Reggie, his back-and-forth relationship with happiness took a steep dive in the summer of 2013 when AT&T, the mobile phone company, decided to make a video about the accident involving Reggie and Jim and Keith. They hired a famous movie director named Werner Herzog.

Megan was excited by the idea. Terryl didn’t see why not. Reggie was scared but didn’t want to let anyone down. He agreed to join a film crew back at the site of the accident. They gathered in early June. At the scene, Reggie imploded.

“He was shaking, crying, sobbing. He couldn’t function. He could not talk,” Terryl says. “He grabbed me and held me and said: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ”

She held him.

After a while, she said: “Reggie, you’re in no position to drive.”

“I feel protective of him now,” Terryl says of Reggie. “It’s a mother type thing.”

Leila showed up over the next few days when the film crew was interviewing people. Megan, Terryl says, was acting kind of crass, burping and being a bit strange. Leila seemed embarrassed by her daughter’s behavior, but otherwise “happy.”

“She smiled. I was really amazed. She asked me about Reggie, and she did not refer to him as ‘that Shaw kid.’ ”

“How’s he doing?” Leila asked.

“He’s not a bad guy,” Terryl told her. “He’s done everything. He will never be able to give back what he took from you, but he’s trying so hard.”

Megan seemed to agree with the assessment that Reggie was a great guy. She told Terryl: “That’s the kind of guy I hope I could see myself winding up with.”

Reggie just couldn’t view himself that way. The AT&T thing really crushed him, the wound torn open again. “I don’t know how I could do something so terrible to people.

“I made the decision, so the rest of my life I’ll have made that decision. That’s never going away. I can tell billions and billions of people and that does not change the fact that those two men were killed.

“I can try to justify it, or make excuses, and try to explain. But when it comes down to it, I shouldn’t have done what I did. It happened. It shouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have done it.”

A FEW WEEKS LATER
, he was back on the stump again, this time talking to the rookie camp at the NBA. He did his thing, and he was feeling very low, the strain and grief pouring out of him.

A psychologist who works for the NBA took notice and pulled Reggie aside, and the two men talked for two hours. The psychologist gave Reggie an analogy relating to airline travel.

“You know how when the safety video comes on, they tell you to put the air mask on yourself first before you put it on your children?”

“Yeah,” Reggie said.

“They do that because you have to save yourself before you can save other people.”

The analogy stuck with Reggie, and he kept wrestling with it. “I don’t have my mask on and I’m trying to put everyone else’s mask on,” he said.

He was thinking of listening to the psychologist’s advice and taking some time to get his own mask on. There was another experience that reinforced that idea. A few weekends later, there was a tournament at his basketball gym. Reggie organized it, managed it, and he put out some materials from AT&T about the risks of texting and driving, along with materials he had created himself—T-shirts, bumper stickers, and videos.

It felt great making that part of the event, “and I didn’t have to speak one time.”

It was a middle ground, giving without opening the wound. But, despite that, Reggie still wrestled with the guilt; he didn’t want to give up the grief too easily. A few days later, he was back in a funk, vacillating again; he didn’t want to act like he hadn’t made a terrible choice. So what if more testimony meant he had to suffer a little more.

“I’ve got a job, and an apartment, a car, a good family, a girlfriend. I’m doing those things to help other people, and I’m doing all right. It’s not like I’ve got no home, and nothing to eat, or no way to provide for myself. I’m getting by.

“If you can save someone else’s life and you don’t do it because it hurts you, how selfish is that?” he asked. For Reggie, it seemed there would yet be more wrestling, and, ultimately, a question on where he should put his attention—on himself or everyone else.

“What if I miss all those opportunities to help because I’m so focused on myself?”

EPILOGUE

I
N 2013, NOT LONG
after the Google glasses made an early appearance at the Gazzloft, a picture began circulating on the Internet. It showed one of the first products of the camera app for the Google glasses. That first picture was taken by a driver wearing the device—purportedly one of the official testers of the fledgling product—who was using the wearable computer while cruising down a huge San Francisco hill.

One of the things public safety advocates fear in the distracted-driving conversation is the glorification of multitasking.

It has an insidious, if not overt, quality of reinforcing the idea that it is uncool, foolish, to not be connected all the time. It’s a message that comes not just from the technology industry but from cafés, sports stadiums (log on during the event), and airlines (offering constant connectivity as the great in-flight perk). There’s a basic understanding in the culture and in our everyday language that it’s better to be connected all the time. That it’s cool. And that the reverse—being disconnected—is worse.

Take just a few examples, like the ad campaign that ran in airports in 2013 promoting the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD phone, an image that featured hipsters staring at their screens and a tagline: “For those who can’t put it down. 32 hours of battery life and a brilliant HD screen.” Or there’s the implicit, or explicit, value of multitasking, as evinced by a popular advertisement from AT&T in which a guy in a suit and tie sits at a table with a group of four toddlers.

“What’s better,” the man asks the kids, “doing two things at once or just one?”

“Two!!” the kids shout.

“You’re sure?” the man asks.

One of the boys says: “It’s two times as awesome.”

The tagline of the ad: “It’s not complicated. Doing two things at once is better, and only AT&T’s network lets you talk and surf on your iPhone 5.”

It’s not complicated—you’d have to be as small-brained as a toddler to not get it, duh—yet, as we’ve seen, it’s also not technically possible from a neurological perspective. You can’t do two things at once, but you can switch back and forth, task switch. The ads from these technology companies do not specifically advocate doing two things at once in the car. In fact, AT&T, after years of fighting against laws aimed at banning cell phone use by drivers, has an active and vibrant campaign against texting and driving.

However, safety advocates feel some of these companies are walking a fine line by glorifying the value of constant connection while vilifying texting and driving. “People certainly are getting mixed messages,” says Barbara Harsha, the longtime traffic safety advocate from the Governors Highway Safety Association.