A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

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A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Page 25

by Matt Richtel


  That was very different, Bunderson thought, from, say, eating, which no one was arguing was inherently distracting, not creating a cognitive load. Sure, of course, someone could get distracted by reaching for food, looking away from the road, or even by turning the dial of a car radio. But those were momentary acts, not systemically provable acts of distraction.

  Bunderson didn’t yet know the neuroscience, but he understood the risk: If an activity was inherently distracting, then it could be seen as inherently negligent.

  He didn’t want the jury to hear that at all.

  ON OTHER POINTS RAISED by Bunderson, Linton argued some and conceded others. For instance, the prosecutor agreed that there was no reason to bring in Reggie’s failed mission, and he had never intended to. He wrote in his own motion on this issue, “The state of Utah does not know why the defense believes this.

  “Had the defense called the state, the state would have stipulated not to introduce any information regarding the fact that the defendant had to come home from his mission for personal reasons once, and then a second time for the charges in the case. The state agrees that this is not relevant.”

  Notably, Linton had referred to Reggie returning from a second mission. Bunderson might not have wanted to have Reggie’s first failed mission admitted, but at the same time, the state didn’t need the jury to hear that Reggie was so powerfully committed to going on a mission that he tried twice. If not for the state’s zealous pursuit of Reggie, he would be serving the Church. The character issue could work both ways, and now it was coming out of play.

  ON THE WAY TO each court hearing, the Shaws avoided Valley View Drive. They never drove to the crash site, or directly past it. Reggie still hadn’t been back to the site. It was the elephant on the road, and it would remain unacknowledged.

  On every trip to Logan, the family did, however, visit the city’s majestic temple, the second oldest in Utah, right up against the mountains, viewable from the Cache County Attorney’s Office. While she prayed, Mary Jane took to thinking about the Christmas song “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” based on an 1863 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  The verse that struck her had to do with hate:

  And in despair I bowed my head;

  “There is no peace on earth,” I said;

  “For hate is strong

  And mocks the song

  Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

  Mary Jane prayed not to hate—not to hate the system, not to hate people who were saying things about Reggie and what a horrible person he was. She begged God for help.

  “Bless us to get through this,” she prayed. “Bless us that those who are trying him will see what’s in his heart.”

  CHAPTER 33

  TERRYL

  IN JANUARY, JACKIE GOT a visitor from Indiana, Gary Maloney, the longtime family friend who’d been the best man at her and Jim’s wedding. And, lately, a virtual friend.

  Jackie and Gary had been bonding for months in World of Warcraft. They played after the girls went to bed. They’d pair up their characters: When she played with Moonrise, her night elf hunter, he played with Pam a dwarf hunter; when she was the human priest she’d named Serifim, he played a night elf he named Tsparhoc. They went on quests and explored dungeons, and they chatted.

  When he came to Tremonton in January, visiting family in the area, he spent an evening hanging out at the Furfaros’. He and the family sat in the living room, watching Battlestar Galactica, and something special happened. Cassidy, the youngest girl, went over and sat with Gary. Stephanie then did, too.

  “It was like a first moment for me,” Jackie says. “I could be with this guy.”

  In April, after many more nights of online interaction, Gary decided on another visit in May. Jackie told the girls, and they asked: “Where is he going to sleep?”

  “Probably on the couch,” Jackie told them.

  “Why not the bedroom?”

  They obviously were just trying to make sense of what kind of friends slept with what kind of friends. She explained about how married people share beds. “We’re not that kind of friends,” Jackie said.

  Gary came in May, around his birthday. Up until that point, Jackie hadn’t had much of a social life, not a single date. She got a babysitter, and for Gary’s birthday, they went to an Olive Garden and then to the movies to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Then they went home and sat on the couch and put on Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Media, movies, video games, television were their common interests.

  They sat there quietly, each trying to figure out how to broach their mutual affection.

  Finally: “I was wondering if we could be a couple,” Gary asked her.

  “Yes.” Jackie’s reaction was immediate and succinct.

  That summer, things blossomed further when Gary came for a weeklong visit while the kids were with their grandmother. They got some alone time, and watched a bunch of movies. For Jackie, their friendship seemed like a version of a real-world happy ending, a realization of her aspiration to move on from Jim’s tragic death and provide a stable life for the girls.

  She told herself she didn’t feel guilty. But that June, she began having vivid dreams. In one, she was hanging out with Gary, and Jim showed up on the doorstep.

  “I’m not dead,” he told her in the dream.

  Still dreaming, Jackie told him: “That cannot really be.”

  FOR THE VICTIMS—AND THEIR advocate in Terryl—the year 2008 evolved into one of living with uncertainty, under the haze of an amorphous legal cloud, and an emotional one. They were adjusting to life without Jim and Keith. If Jackie was seeing some light at the end of the cloud, that was less true for Leila.

  Her life was a blur of grief and humdrum, punctuated by periodic court hearings. She went back to work as a bookkeeper, keeping the same schedule she had when Keith died, working Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Her income was modest; she made between $25,000 and $30,000 a year, and she now had to grapple with a new bill, health care insurance for her and Megan, something Keith’s job once covered. The policy cost her $400 per month initially, then leapt to $850.

  Aggravating the costs was Megan’s ongoing struggle with severe kidney stones. More than once, the young lady called her mother in the middle of the night in pain, and the pair rushed to the emergency room.

  She felt her relationship with her daughter was decent, even improving. Megan would come over regularly for dinner. One of Leila’s pleasures was cooking, lots of hearty soups in the winter, and salads as things got warmer. When Megan wasn’t there, which was most nights, she’d cook for herself and then sit down with a book and read with the television going in the background. She’d watch the news and stock shows that bore increasingly bad news about the economy as 2008 wore on. She tried to keep track of her and Keith’s once comfortable savings, which she had hoped to not touch until later but now was forced sometimes to dip into. She watched police dramas, NCIS and Law & Order, and she popped back and forth with her book, having to go back and reread parts she’d missed when focused on the TV.

  It was television, she thought, that brought out the rare hint of judgment from Keith. Not the medium, but some of the people who were on the shows, like Jerry Springer. They were all the things he tried not to be, showy and self-referential. “ ‘Who are these people seeking attention?’ ” she recalled him saying. “ ‘Who on earth would go out there and act that way and air their personal issues to the max?’

  “He was an introvert to the max. I’m an introvert, and he was more of an introvert than me.”

  It explained in no small measure the depth of her grief. She’d found someone she could share the world with, quietly. She wasn’t comfortable putting herself back into the world. And if she didn’t do that, could she ever share herself with someone else?

  OF THE TWO WIDOWS—JACKIE and Leila—Terryl really connected to Jackie. The pair were becoming friends. It wasn’t so much that Terryl didn
’t connect to Leila, but, rather, there was just less chance to do so. Their lives didn’t naturally intersect quite the same way, and Leila’s introversion didn’t invite much else.

  In Jackie, Terryl particularly appreciated someone who looked at the glass as half full, and who forged ahead with her life—in Terryl’s own mode.

  But as their relationship strengthened, there was one place Terryl harbored a quiet reservation about Jackie. Terryl didn’t understand her family’s heavy media use. Well, more than that, she was silently critical of it. She worried that Jackie’s girls would get lost in media or escape to it. Her observation came at a time when media use in general was exploding among children, up to an average of around ten hours a day of screen time, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

  Broadly, Terryl associated heavy media use with a lack of engagement between parents and children, and less emphasis on school.

  Jackie felt her girls were doing fine and that media use was part of the family dynamic. And the girls, Stephanie and Cassidy, were doing well in school, particularly in math. Besides, Jackie pointed out, Utah was cold a lot of the year, and computers, television, and video games were a better way to spend time than “sending them outside when it’s thirty degrees or less, which is not practical.”

  Jackie conceded that some of the television shows the family watched together, like crime dramas, “are probably not great,” and could be “kind of gruesome.” But homework always got done, and the girls spent plenty of time with their friends.

  Later research would show that Jackie’s views are consistent with the perspective of the majority of American parents, according to a survey published by the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University. The 2013 survey found that 59 percent of 2,300 parents surveyed did not worry that their kids would get addicted to technology, and 78 percent said they do not have concerns or conflicts inside the family around media use.

  The responses surprised one of the study’s authors, Vicky Rideout, a pioneer in the study of children’s media use. But there was another finding in the survey that perhaps explained why parents were not all that concerned: They themselves were massive consumers of media. In nearly 40 percent of families, the parents consume eleven hours of screen media a day, which does not include work time. (The survey double-counts the time that a person uses two sources of media at once; for instance, if a person spent one hour simultaneously watching TV while surfing the Internet on a laptop, that counted as two hours of media time.) And in another 45 percent of families, parents consumed five hours of screen time per day. These figures “startled” Rideout, but she said they also helped explain why parents weren’t worried about their children, given that the parents were setting a tone and the children were following.

  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.”

  CHAPTER 34

  REGGIE

  DURING 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?

 

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