A Deadly Wandering

Matt Richtel

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062284082
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Technology & Engineering Research & Skills
• Index: Technology & Engineering

"Deserves a spot next to Fast Food Nation and To Kill a Mockingbird in America's high school curriculums. To say it may save lives is self-evident." — New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, Chrisitian Science Monitor, Kirkus, Winnipeg Free Press

One of the decade's most original and masterfully reported books, A Deadly Wandering by Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Matt Richtel interweaves the cutting-edge science of attention with the tensely plotted story of a mysterious car accident and its aftermath to answer some of the defining questions of our time: What is technology doing to us? Can our minds keep up with the pace of change? How can we find balance?

On the last day of summer, an ordinary Utah college student named Reggie Shaw fatally struck two rocket scientists while texting and driving along a majestic stretch of highway bordering the Rocky Mountains. A Deadly Wandering follows Reggie from the moment of the tragedy, through the police investigation, the state's groundbreaking prosecution, and ultimately, Reggie's wrenching admission of responsibility. Richtel parallels Reggie's journey with leading-edge scientific findings on the impact technology has on our brains, showing how these devices play to our deepest social instincts. A propulsive read filled with surprising scientific detail, riveting narrative tension, and rare emotional depth, A Deadly Wandering is a book that can change—and save—lives.

---

PART ONE

---

COLLISION

CHAPTER 1

REGGIE

IN EARLY JUNE 2006, nineteen-year-old Reggie Shaw sat in the backseat of a Chevy Tahoe heading north under a big, cloudless Utah sky. His father, Ed, a machine-shop manager, was crying quietly as he drove the white sport-utility vehicle. In the passenger seat, Reggie’s mother, Mary Jane, sobbed.

Reggie was her little boy, her baby, at least until his little sister came along when Mary Jane was forty. Among her brood of six, Reggie was the quiet charmer, a peacemaker, sensitive with a dry wit, both athletic and awkward, honest. This time to a fault.

A day earlier, Reggie had been sitting in a classroom in Provo at the Missionary Training Center. He was surrounded by eager teen Mormons, each preparing to embark on a mission, Reggie’s lifelong dream. He’d recently returned from his freshman year at a small Mormon college in Virginia, where he’d played basketball, and he was committed to taking the Mormon message to Winnipeg. But a secret nagged at him. He went to his president at the training center, and he confessed: He’d recently had sex with his girlfriend, Cammi.

The fact that he’d previously lied about their coupling, and hadn’t done the spiritual work to put it behind him, ruled out his participation in the mission. Most horrifying to Reggie was the knowledge that the Church would soon phone his parents. The family lived in Tremonton, in the northernmost part of Utah. It had some of the heaviest concentration of Mormons in the state and, by extension, in the world. When someone came home early from a mission, everyone in the community knew about it, and people would suspect the reason. Even though the Shaws were well regarded, with deep roots, Reggie felt he’d marked not just himself, but his family.

“It was difficult for them to drop me off knowing I wouldn’t be back for two years,” he says, looking back. “It was much more difficult to pick me up.” His dad was a quiet man, particularly if you didn’t know him well, someone who ached for his children when they hurt, even if he couldn’t quite express it. This was the first time Reggie could remember seeing him cry.

Reggie uttered hardly a word as they wound their way through Salt Lake City on I-15 North. It was nearly seven p.m. The sun, falling in the west, to the left of the Chevy, snuck into the car at an insidious angle, causing Reggie to squint. He had a short haircut, leaving a touch of bangs in the front. His young face usually projected kindness, approachability, but now held heavy weight he had no language to express.

In the distance, to the right of the car, in the east, rose the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains. The imposing jagged peaks put the topography out of balance, almost tilting the land in their direction; the mountains had a gravity that helped define the state, outline it, just as they would come to define Reggie.

The family continued north, passing through Salt Lake City, things and places blurring—the auto mall, McDonald’s, Best Buy, the exit for the University of Utah. As they drove, Reggie thought about Cammi, and wondered what would become of them, and her, of him.

Less than an hour later, they arrived at the two-story, red-brick home in Tremonton, the town where Reggie had grown up, and his mom had, too. Her family had raised sugar beets, cattle, hay, and corn. Lots of land, few people. Everyone still knew everyone. By 2006, there were fewer than six thousand residents. Down the block from the Shaws lived the town’s mayor; kitty-corner from the mayor lived their LDS bishop. They were all within walking distance from Reggie’s elementary, middle, and high schools, from the Little League field his dad had helped care for, and the recreation center where Reggie first learned to play his great passion.

A few days after they returned home from the failed mission, on a Sunday, Reggie went to church. Mary Jane felt a cascade of emotions. Heartbroken, embarrassed. “If you come home like that, it’s almost like a disgrace,” Reggie’s mom says now. “But he walked right back into church. He never faltered.

“I was very proud of him for having the courage to do that.”

That summer, Reggie took a painting job at Wall to Wall, a company in Logan, the veritable big city to the east, over and then around the first batch of mountains, past Chocolate Peak and Scout Peak. Every morning, it was the same thing; Reggie was up and out of the house by six a.m., he’d drive the Tahoe north through town in the dark, then take a right at Valley View Drive, where things got wide open, and then accelerate up the crest into the foothills.

He lived in the room he’d once shared with his older brother Nick. It was all boy; Chicago Cubs wallpaper covered the bottom third of the wall. There was a poster of Reggie’s favorite basketball player, Reggie Miller, but the star’s bio was covered up by a picture of Jesus, looking serene, wearing a white shirt with a red robe over it.

Reggie tried to reconnect with Cammi. “She was the one, man. That’s what I thought.” She didn’t share his resolve. He couldn’t quite figure out why things weren’t working, her periodic distance. Then one day, she stopped taking his calls. He couldn’t get ahold of her. Then she reappeared. “She called me up and said she’d gotten engaged to someone else.”

By September, he’d developed a rhythm. Painting, trying to figure out what would come next, playing recreational hoops and video games, and forming a new friendship, with Briana Bishop. Still just a friendship, but with potential.

Most of all, he was doing the spiritual work to cleanse his transgression. He was determined to get square with his Church and Maker so he could embark again on a mission, sometime the following year. It was not the path that Reggie had once idealized, but it was a clear direction and one he was undertaking with typical, quiet resolve.

THE LAST DAY OF summer was September 22. The weather was already turning, fast. Just after 6:15 a.m., Reggie climbed into the SUV to head to a job in Logan. Like always, he took his Cingular flip phone. After he turned east on Valley View Drive, he made his regular stop at the Sinclair gas station for his one-liter plastic bottle of Pepsi. It had started to rain.

At the same gas station, John Kaiserman was pulling up in his Ford F-250, hauling a trailer. For Kaiserman, forty-one, a stout man with a handlebar mustache, the trailer was a kind of mobile office or workshop. He was a farrier, a certified maker of horseshoes, and his trailer carried all the tools of his trade, including nearly one thousand pounds of horseshoes, a gas forge, and a 150-pound anvil. As farriers had done since the Old West, he would visit your farm, assess your horse’s hoof needs, “get a piece of aluminum or steel, or whatever your horse required, and I could build it on site, and nail it on.” Not bad for the price of $65 to $150 per horse.

The equipment was a hell of a lot of weight to carry around, maybe 4,500 pounds worth. Hence the powerful Ford, itself weighing around 6,000 pounds; together with the trailer, it was nearly five tons—a missile at highway speeds.

For Kaiserman, that morning had been a particularly pleasant one; weirdly so, he thought. He’d awakened naturally thirty minutes earlier than usual. It gave him more than enough time to pitch the hay and tend to the animals on his own modest property, located on five acres just outside Tremonton.

He was comfortably on schedule when he pulled his big load out of the Sinclair station and back onto the road, heading toward Logan. He turned the radio to 96.7, country music. He looked up to see a few snowflakes, and, about two hundred yards ahead, Reggie’s white Chevy. It was dark, but Kaiserman was able to see the vehicle wander several times across the yellow divide, then steer back. A few miles later, the Chevy did it again. Kaiserman thought it odd, and he kept his distance. There was no hurry to get to Logan, he thought, no need to tailgate, and the weather was bad. I got all the time in the world.

As they pressed on over the curves and hills, Kaiserman saw something that gave him greater pause. The Chevy veered entirely into the incoming lane before recovering with a quick jerk of the wheel. What was going on? Kaiserman wondered whether the driver was unsure of where he was going. Or maybe the driver was thinking of taking a left turn on one of the dirt side roads but was having trouble in the low light figuring out which was the correct road.

Or, Kaiserman thought, maybe the driver of the Tahoe was trying to pass the semi just ahead of him. The Chevy, as he put it later, was “half near tailgating the semi.” Strange behavior, bordering on very dangerous; why try to pass a semi in the freezing rain?

This guy is an idiot, Kaiserman thought. This guy is going to cause us all some trouble.

ABOUT FIFTEEN MILES AWAY, heading out of Logan, in the opposite direction, was a blue 1999 Saturn sedan. Its driver was James Furfaro, thirty-eight, who’d left home that morning a bit late. As usual, he picked up his friend and colleague, Keith O’Dell, fifty, at a Park & Ride in Logan. Both men were scientists commuting to their jobs at ATK Systems, where they were helping build rocket boosters. Rocket scientists. As they drove, Jim munched Cheerios from a plastic baggie handed to him by his wife.

Keith ate his regular breakfast, a red Fuji apple. He was tired, which was his lot in life. He was a contented workaholic. But he’d seemed particularly tired of late, to the point that his wife had suggested that morning that he skip work and stay home.

Around 6:40 a.m., just minutes before dawn, Keith and Jim neared milepost 106.6, which was right around the turnoff to a gun range. Traffic was modest. KVNU, a local radio station, reported the temperature at thirty-three degrees. The roads were wet but not icy.

In the darkness, Keith and Jim could make out oncoming headlights, but not the big, heavy trucks the lights belonged to. First was the semi. Then came Reggie in the Chevy, but he was tracking so close to the semi that he was basically hidden from Jim and Keith’s view. Then, a bit farther back, still cautious, drove Kaiserman and his haul. Two minutes earlier, this trio of trucks had sped down the last big hill before Logan—a crest that in the light afforded a spectacular view of Cache Valley below—and they’d descended into a flat patch. It was a straightaway, a relatively easy stretch, though narrow. Reggie felt he knew the road like the back of his hand. He’d driven this hundreds of times to go to Logan—the region’s big city—to go to work, see movies, go on dates, hang out, attend all three of his brothers’ weddings; he’d taken his driver’s test there.

Kaiserman noticed a trickle of snowflakes, not a flurry, intermittent. Then he saw the Chevy slip left again, almost lazily drifting from behind the semi. This time, there was a car coming in the other direction. Even at fifty-five miles an hour, time played a trick on Kaiserman. He had a moment of clarity, not slow-motion exactly, but he could see it coming, something horrible. The Chevy was not returning to its side of the road. Its left front edge was fully crossed over the line. Still barreling at highway speeds, it closed in on the smaller car coming the other way, the distance narrowing by the instant. Things suddenly began to speed up.

The Chevy clipped the side of the Saturn on the driver’s-side door. The Chevy bounced off. The sedan carrying Jim and Keith fishtailed. It turned fully sideways. It crossed the yellow divider. Out of control. And then it was right in Kaiserman’s path. Oh shit, thought the farrier.

He slammed on the brakes. He spun the wheel to the right. It might send him into the ditch, he realized, but at least he’d avoid hitting the sedan square on. It was too late. Holy shit, the farrier thought, this is going to hurt.

On impact, he heard a crunching sound, somehow modest, a noise that reminded him more of a fender bender than what this was: a high-speed direct hit. The airbag exploded in Kaiserman’s face. Foot pressed on the brake, he screeched to the right and saw the front hood of his truck crumple and rise. He skidded to a stop, realizing his driver’s-side door was open. Something hurt, his back maybe; it didn’t fully register. He climbed out and saw that his Ford had practically bisected the sedan, severed it. It was wrapped around his truck. “My bumper was against the driver’s shoulder.”

He pulled out his phone and dialed 911.

At the same moment, Reggie climbed out of the Tahoe. He was about a hundred yards away, having finally come to a stop after glancing off the Saturn and then righting himself down the road, his truck virtually unharmed. He saw the wreckage and also dialed 911. But the call didn’t go through.

Kaiserman’s call did connect successfully. The dispatcher picked up at 6:48:45 a.m., according to the official recording.

“Hurry, send an ambulance.”

The dispatcher asked what happened.

“A guy hit a car and it spun him in front of me, and I T-boned him. I think he’s dead.”

At this point, Kaiserman didn’t have a vantage point to see there were two people in the Saturn. The dispatcher asked how many cars were involved, and the location of the accident.

“He’s in bad shape. He’s bad.” He reached inside the sedan to inspect Jim. “No movement, no pulse.”

All of a sudden Kaiserman realized there were people everywhere. Sounds, sirens, lights. It was just shy of 6:52 a.m., minutes after dawn, when an emergency medical technician took the phone from Kaiserman.

“We have two 10-85 Echoes here,” the EMT told the dispa...