Cell Phones and Driving

It is strange that this is the first post I make on this blog after updating it to a more cheery look. I had planned for a different inaugural post about the joy my family has experienced since we changed the way we eat but something happened last night that I need to report on—I may have seen someone be killed.

I went to the Priesthood Session of General Conference with a friend last night and then came home. Jamie and I cleaned and got the kids in their jammies then I went out to pick up some food while Jamie finished putting the children to sleep. We were planning to do a little in-house date sharing a Subway sandwich and some Arby’s Jalapeño poppers when I got back.

After picking up the sandwich, I tried calling my sister and then a friend to talk to on the phone. I often get bored while driving and like to talk on the phone with people to distract from the monotony. But, alas, neither my sister nor my friend answered. So, I was consigned to drive from Subway to Arby’s with no one to keep me company.

I was driving in the lane closest to the median when I saw a man dressed in black J-walking in front of me. He was just leaving my lane heading into the next. A black car came from behind me, driving in the lane to the right of me—the same lane the pedestiran was walking into. I honked my horn in an attempt to warn the black car. But it was too late. The black car’s breaks stretched just as it hit the man and threw him several feet into the air.

A picture of scene of the accident just after it happened taken
by Deseret News.

It was surreal. I’ve never seen anyone get hit by a car before. I saw what looked like white puffs of cotton fly in all directions which gave me the strange thought that this must be a prank and the man was a scarecrow in the road. I still don’t know what those white puffs were. Maybe glass shards of the windshield catching the light just the right way.

But it was no prank. A real man got hit by a car. I pulled into a parking lot as quick as I could and rushed to the scene. The man in black was laying on the ground, barely breathing. People tried to talk to him but he didn’t respond. The man driving the black car was in a panic. The police took him away.

A detective interviewed me as a witness. He said we still don’t know how this will turn out but it doesn’t look good. I’m not sure if the pedestrian lived or died. As of now, the news articles I’ve found about the incident say the man was critically injured but do not yet say whether he will live.

Here’s what I take away from the whole experience: it could have been me. 

If I’d left Subway just a minute earlier, the man might still have been in my lane while he crossed the street. I tried to hit my horn to warn the other driver but was too late. Could I have hit my breaks any faster than my horn?

And if he had been in my lane and my sister or friend had been available to talk on the phone, talking to one of them would have significantly lowered my response time. And maybe the inattention caused by talking on the phone would have also increased the speed at which I was driving, causing me to reach that critical place in the road when the man was in my lane.

So, I am making a commitment now to never talk on the phone again while driving. I realize how critical a second of response time can be on the road and I cannot afford to lose that second because I’m bored and want to use my phone while driving. I learned last night that lives literally hang in the balance.