by Matt Richtel
He seemed to address the courtroom. “Any of you who have yelled at the kids, you’ve been distracted. Any of you who looked at a flock of geese while driving, you’ve been distracted. It’s just a matter of degree.”
“It’s a matter of consequence,” the judge interrupted, a slight edge in his voice.
“I’m not denying that Your Honor,” Bunderson countered quickly. “This could have happened to any of us.”
DIRECTLY BEHIND BUNDERSON AND Reggie, a few rows back, Jackie jotted notes on a small pad, looking impassive. Megan looked irritated, even bored, her eyes sometimes wandering from the proceedings. Their faces didn’t betray their incredulity. Bunderson, in describing Reggie’s actions as being like any other distraction, seemed to run afoul of everything that they had learned during this twenty-nine-month period, from Dr. Strayer and all the rest. To these families, it all seemed so disingenuous, the thinly veiled plea for mercy and, most of all, the idea that Reggie was taking responsibility, “willing to man up.”
All they’d had for two and a half years was silence and lies. Now, a veritable deathbed conversion, a presentencing conversion. How contrite or sorry could Reggie really be, and why?
Bunderson concluded. Judge Willmore asked if Reggie had anything to say.
REGGIE HAD STARTED WRITING apology letters days after the accident, the ones he never sent. Some just said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over. He’d practiced this idea in his head virtually daily, multiple times a day. But when he started, the first few minutes, it sounded like a high school essay—topic sentences followed by explanations.
He began: “I wrote this letter to those I have harmed.”
He wore a blue suit and yellow tie, his hair close-cut, the sideburns slightly long as had become the style. He’d filled out the last couple of years, looking just shy of imposing, especially next to the older, slighter Bunderson. His voice tended to be slightly high, plaintive.
“At this time, I would like to express my love and remorse toward their families who have been in my heart and in my prayers daily,” he read from his letter. “I truly realize and I understand that I was wrong to not pay closer attention.”
Behind him, Jackie shifted in her seat but seemed unmoved.
Reggie apologized for his ignorance, saying he wished he could rewind the tape, give back the lives of “these great men.” He talked about learning of the dangers of distracted driving, vowing to “take this terrible situation and help make the roads a safer place for us and our families.”
Here, a few minutes in, the tenor changed, almost like he’d completed the part he felt compelled to say, or was coached to say, and now moved on to the part he wanted to say.
“I’ve learned over the past couple of years . . .” Reggie paused to not lose his emotions. “. . . that good people strive to care for and help protect people’s lives. Good people learn from their mistakes and try to make them right and seek forgiveness from those they have offended or harmed.
“I am here today striving to be a good person.
“In reflecting at who I was age at nineteen, I am very ashamed by my decisions and my decision making at that time.” A bailiff walked over and put a box of tissue in front of Reggie. Behind him, in the rows, Megan crossed her arms, Jackie’s head was tilted as if watching an unusual animal at the zoo.
“I am also very embarrassed by how I handled myself in this situation. I give you my solemn vow that I will never behave in that manner again.” Reggie choked back tears. Bunderson looked straight down. Reggie explained he regularly cries and that his “tears of remorse have caused me to change in every possible way.”
He continued: “I can’t take back my actions. I can only live from this day on in service to others in remorseful remembrance of James Furfaro and Keith O’Dell.” He could barely get the words out, the next few minutes halting in presentation, and in that way, and substance, the high-school-essay nature melted away to core grief.
He explained that remorse, to be real, must be “coupled with action.” The time has come, he said, to act. First, he said, he must apologize.
Hardly able to speak now, he looked up, briefly. “I am so sorry. I am sorry for being careless and for not paying more attention behind the wheel that morning that led to the deaths of your loving husbands, sons, brothers, uncles, and, most importantly, your fathers. My apologies are sincere and my love for you is great.
“I beg and plead to these families for their forgiveness. I made a mistake, and although I realize that nothing can replace the lives of these great men and the pain these families have felt, I’m willing to do anything to gain their forgiveness.”
It was full-body contrition. Behind Reggie, the families seemed unmoved, except Leila. She cried, but not because the young man apologizing had reached her but rather because his words, hollow to her, could not bring Keith back.
Bunderson continued to look down, boring a hole in the table beneath him.
“I have felt pain and heartache in unexplainable great measures the last few years. But I know my greatest pain cannot compare to the pain they felt after losing a loved one,” Reggie said. “I am willing to do anything to make this right to you. I’m so sorry. I truly am.” He sobbed, barely able to speak. He bit his bottom lip, a desperate measure to hold his body together at the mouth. “I can only hope and pray that I can continue to live my life to make things better forever for everyone. I shall forever live my life connected to these families by the weight of my foolishness. I am truly sorry.
“I can finally be the person I should’ve been as a nineteen-year-old kid,” Reggie said.
He looked up.
“From now on, my purpose in life is to make others aware of dangers that ultimately took lives on the morning of September 22, 2006.”
FILLING THE SILENCE THAT followed Reggie’s statement, Bunderson offered a quick comment, a reiteration: He asked for a follow-up court date in six months, so that the judge could sign off that Reggie had finished his community service, jail time, and that the young man could move on.
It felt mildly off-key after Reggie had pledged his life to service. But, then, there are courtroom promises and deathbed conversions, and then there’s reality.
THE JUDGE ASKED LINTON whether any victims or family members wished to speak. The first to rise was John Kaiserman, wearing a black vest over a red shirt and sporting his customary handlebar mustache. He offered apologies and condolences to the families of Jim and Keith. He then talked of his own journey since the accident, which he says left him with injuries that forced him to give up his passion of being a farrier. “How great the day when you can enjoy the labor that puts the food on your table,” said Kaiserman, with a Shakespearean flare, a sprinkle of melodrama, jutting in and illuminating every few paragraphs of his otherwise plainspoken delivery. He wiped away a tear and spoke of how his wife and daughters, since the accident, see him walk out the door each day and say: “Be safe, Daddy.”
He questioned Reggie’s sincerity. “The correct time for dialogue was September 2006. A great deal of pain and countless hours of wasted time and energy could’ve been avoided. At this time, the apologies you make seem to be heartfelt but they ring fairly hollow.”
And he told Reggie how this incident has divided a community, with some people thinking the sentence is too harsh, that this was a mere accident, while others think it too light and that “nothing short of your head on a platter will suffice.”
“Reggie, I hope in the future you may be able to get past this. Somehow everyone who survives this will.”
JACKIE SPOKE NEXT, SHAKING while she read quickly as if in great discomfort, seemingly more nervous than grieving. She chose the moment not to admonish Reggie, but to celebrate Jim, talking of her husband’s zest for life, the unicycling, geocaching, Dance Dance Revolution, World of Warcraft, how his girls miss him and she misses him with the girls. She talked of his many accolades as a rocket scientist. “I’d planned to grow old with Jim
. We were supposed to raise children together, supposed to enjoy life together. Today, I’m alone, a single parent trying to raise the kids by myself. All we have are faded memories.”
She concluded by telling Judge Willmore: “Please send a message to people everywhere that texting and driving are dangerous and the effects can be both heartbreaking and devastating.”
“MY DAD WAS THE most important part of my life,” said Megan, who spoke next. “He always helped me.
“My wedding was the hardest thing ever, having to walk down the aisle without my dad.”
She mentioned all the times that they spent together.
“I don’t know what else to say.”
LEILA, HER BLOND HAIR long and straight to the middle of her back, came to the podium on the verge of tears. But there was force and dignity in her even as she, acknowledging her public grieving, said, “Forgive me. I’ve been very emotional for twenty-nine and a half months. Forgive me.”
Like Jackie did of Jim, Leila celebrated Keith, “the sweetest, kindest, quiet, shy genius.” She talked of his hobbies and talents, how he was celebrated at his funeral as one of the great rocket scientists. She spoke of his closeness with Megan, and, in conclusion, of his relationship with her, and hers to him.
“He was my best friend for over thirty years and I will miss him forever.”
LINTON ADDRESSED THE JUDGE, saying this had been one of the toughest cases, “perhaps more difficult than cases gotten more notoriety and more attention—murder cases, rape cases. In all of those cases, I knew that somebody had intended ill upon another.”
In this case, he said, the act was one that, as Bunderson said, “seems so commonplace.”
But then he took a strong stance against something the opposing counsel had said.
“I owe it to this community to say that texting while you’re driving is not the same as looking at geese on the horizon. It’s not the same as adjusting the radio. It’s a singular act of criminal negligence. That doesn’t make Mr. Shaw evil—I would never say that—but it leads to a tragic result, and it is in an effort to avoid this kind of tragedy again that I brought this charge, Your Honor.
“This is criminal conduct not committed by evil people but committed by people who forgot they’re traveling down the road with two thousand pounds of steel beneath them with a potential consequence of absolute and total devastation.”
IN A VOICE JUST shy of quiet, Judge Willmore asked Reggie to come to the podium.
“What a tragedy,” the judge began. “It’s a struggle for me to know what to do in a case like this.”
He said his heart goes out to the families and thanked them for their letters and statements.
“To you, Mr. Shaw,” he said, turning to Reggie. “What you did was a crime. It wasn’t a mistake. I keep hearing ‘mistake, mistake, mistake.’ ”
With his quiet, penetrating intensity, he said that it’s not a “mistake” if a reasonable person knows the risks. “I can’t see it any other way!” The words burst from him.
Then, just as instantly, his calm returned as he spoke of his frustration that the case wore on for so long. “It should’ve never taken this long,” he said, and gave an oblique slap to the lawyers, noting “our system is attorney-driven,” without elaborating.
He talked of being vexed by Reggie’s lack of apology, saying he could’ve expressed sorrow to the families without admitting guilt. Absent an apology, he said, “common decency is thrown to the wayside.”
He turned to the actual sentencing. As a preface, the judge explained that the law allowed a penalty of up to a year in jail for each count of negligent homicide. However, he noted, the deal reached by the attorneys restricted him to sentencing Reggie to between fifteen and ninety days, a restriction he said frustrated him and his ability to exercise the full of his judgment.
He then thanked Kaylene for what he characterized as her excellent probation report, reminding the courtroom it recommended a sentence of fifteen days. He contrasted her view, and that of some others in the case, who wanted a more lenient sentence, with the view of Rindlisbacher, who would like to see the full weight of the law brought to bear.
“I’ve never seen such a conflict in law enforcement,” he said.
And he added: “It just shows how society views this crime.”
It’s a pointed example of Judge Willmore’s understated eloquence, an easy thing to miss, but a critical insight. This case, he was saying, happened on a razor’s edge. Some wanting charges, others not, but all of them, in one way or another, seeing themselves in Reggie, viewing this tiny moment in time as a projection of how they would’ve handled themselves, or have. His attention, ours, is so fragile. It can happen to anyone. Can any of us be expected to know the consequences of actions that feel so close to mere accident?
The judge said he feared that some will view the decision he is poised to announce without understanding the severity and complexity of distraction science. “The public will judge this sentence based only on the media—very few of the public will do anything to educate themselves about this problem.”
Earlier in the day, the judge said, he called the Utah State Legislature to ask the status of the bill Reggie had testified about. He was told it is in a Senate committee and likely to pass. “A big part of that is due to the testimony of Reggie Shaw.”
At the podium, Reggie wiped away a tear.
“Mr. Shaw, that doesn’t make you a hero,” Judge Willmore addressed him. Reggie shook his head. “All it shows is that you’re trying to make something good out of this tragedy.
“I was going to sentence you to ninety days,” the judge said. In light of the legislative action and Reggie’s other efforts, the judge ordered thirty days of jail time, which could expand to ninety days if Reggie didn’t meet his other conditions:
• Two hundred hours of community service, including, specifically, 150 hours speaking to local schools about distracted driving;
• Continuing to work with legislators.
He added a final, unusual piece to the sentence.
“The last condition, and I’ll get beat up in the media for this, is that you will read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, which talks about a man who has done a terrible wrong and makes it right again.”
The story starts when Jean Valjean is released from prison after serving nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. Just out of prison, he steals again, this time silver candlesticks from a shelter. He is caught by a benevolent bishop, who keeps Valjean from going to prison for life by telling police he’d given the squalid ex-prisoner the candlesticks as a gift.
The bishop urges Valjean to take the candlesticks to invest as seedlings in a life devoted to good. He does just that, becoming a wealthy benefactor of the impoverished, a generous and kind man beyond compare. And yet he remains haunted and hunted, his past troubles following him like a mark of Cain.
With this parting decree, Judge Willmore dismissed the court.
Leila and her family wandered out. Jackie lingered. She numbly accepted apologies from the Shaw family.
Linton saw Reggie walking in his direction, maybe on purpose, maybe just blank-faced, heading in that direction. Linton couldn’t tell.
“Reggie.”
The shell-shocked young man looked up.
“This is your true mission. Your true mission may be saving lives.”
Reggie’s face was blank.
“Instead of trying to convert people, your true mission is saving lives.”
Linton recalled Bunderson rushing over, apparently angry that the prosecutor would be talking to his client. Reggie kept looking at Linton.
“Either he agreed with me,” Linton says he thought, “or it was just so true you couldn’t get around it.”
CHAPTER 42
THE LAWMAKERS
TWO DAYS LATER, ON March 12, the Utah State Senate passed legislation to ban texting and driving. The vote was 26–1, not a surprise at that point, giv
en that the Senate, while still conservative by any national measure, was less so than the House, and certainly less than the law enforcement committee in the House that the legislation passed through a few weeks earlier.
The legislation, which had been shepherded by Senator Hillyard, made it a class C misdemeanor to use a device to text or send email, and a class B misdemeanor if a driver doing such an act were to cause severe bodily injury. It would be a second-degree felony if death resulted.
The standard was “simple negligence,” as the law puts it: “a failure to exercise a degree of care that a reasonable and prudent individual would exercise under the same or similar circumstances.”
On March 25, Governor Jon Huntsman signed into law the toughest ban in the country on texting while driving.
Utah residents, if they hadn’t been already, were put on notice. This is dangerous and illegal, and they had better know it.
People who followed the politics and policies of the state were somewhat astounded. They also knew what deserved the credit: the deaths of Jim and Keith. Scott Wyatt, the former county attorney in Cache County, the man who hired Terryl, says she “deserves most of the credit” for the law. She pushed the prosecutors to go after Reggie, then took on the cause of texting and driving, amassing a binder of evidence for media and legislators.
Dr. Strayer knew well the long odds something like this would pass through Utah’s house. He joined others in saying that equal, if not more, credit also goes to another person who had begun to turn tragedy into redemption.
Says Dr. Strayer: “They should call it ‘Reggie’s Law.’ ”
CHAPTER 43
JUSTICE
A FILM CREW VIDEOTAPED Reggie’s entrance into jail on May 8. The crew worked for Zero Fatalities, a public safety organization aimed at curbing automobile accidents and car-related injuries and deaths.
In the video, Reggie’s hands are up against a wall as a guard pats him down. He wears jeans and a blue sweatshirt. Moments later, the video cuts to him exiting the “Inmate Changing Room.”