A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Page 2

  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 wa
s 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 dispatcher. Echo meaning “fatality.”

  Dispatcher: “Two 10-85 Echo?”

  The dispatcher asked whether it was possible to start CPR. No, the med tech reported, there was no way to get into the vehicle. The men would need extraction, and they were dead.

  Dispatcher: “Is there anybody else injured on the scene?”

  No, the EMT said. “Apparently there is a third vehicle that was involved. There are no injuries on that one also.” Then he added: “We’ll definitely need law enforcement.”

  TEN MILES AWAY AS the crow flies, the radio beeped three times in the Crown Victoria of Utah State Trooper Bart Rindlisbacher. Just after 6:48 a.m., when the 911 call first came in, the dispatcher called out a 10-50 PI, a personal injury accident, and the coordinates.

  Trooper Rindlisbacher pulled a quick turn and headed for the scene. He’d started his shift at six a.m. and was still getting his bearings. Rindlisbacher was on his first week back on the law enforcement job after doing a tour in Iraq. He’d done security convoy, escorting trucks to the Turkish border, dressed in full body protection, hoping neither he nor the trucks would stumble onto land mines or IEDs.

  Even before his tour, he was no stranger to carnage. He’d worked in the army as an emergency room tech in Korea and at Fort Lewis in Washington. He got used to shutting out the noise and danger; at night, on the base in Iraq, he’d pull on eyeshades and his headphones and listen to classic rock. Once, he’d slept through a mortar attack.

  He managed in Iraq to also train for a marathon that was a mere few weeks away. Rindlisbacher was a man with a reputation for tenacity.

  A local Logan city police officer came over Rindlisbacher’s radio. The cop had arrived at the scene. “Possible Echo,” the officer reported. Another flurry of snow.

  Minutes later, Rindlisbacher arrived at the scene. There were already fire trucks. The trooper looked inside the Saturn. No doubt: Echo. The bodies were tossed and charred. Both men appeared to have been killed on impact.

  Because Rindlisbacher had only been back on the job for a week, his car hadn’t been fully equipped. He pulled out his own personal camera and began shooting pictures before anything got moved. A decidedly nasty wreck, he concluded. A collision so violent it popped out the passenger’s eyeballs.

  Rindlisbacher started looking for witnesses; the local cop showed him to Kaiserman, who was sitting in the back of an ambulance and gave the trooper his account of the swerving Chevy Tahoe. The cop also pointed Rindlisbacher one hundred yards down the road to a young man standing beside a white sport-utility vehicle.

  Rindlisbacher walked down to Reggie. It was now clear he’d been the driver of the car that clipped the Saturn. The trooper made a quick assessment of the young man. Six feet tall, around 150 pounds, quiet. He also discovered that Reggie’s mother was there. She’d arrived soon after receiving a call from Reggie. Even before he started talking to Reggie and his mom, Mary Jane struck Rindlisbacher as a take-charge kind of person.

  As he got his bearings, he glanced at a statement Reggie had already written out for the local police. The first officer on the scene, Chad Vernon, who arrived minutes before Rindlisbacher, had asked Reggie what happened. The young man told Vernon that his car had hydroplaned.

  “I was driving east toward Logan,” Reggie then wrote in a statement with neat-enough letters that lean slightly left. “My car pulled to the left and I met another car in the middle. We clipped each other, and he spun out behind me. The truck and trailer behind me then T-boned him and they ended in a ditch.”

  Rindlisbacher introduced himself and asked if Reggie would be okay with taking a drug test. Sure, Reggie said.

  Trooper Rindlisbacher said he needed to take Reggie to Logan Regional Hospital. Reggie’s mother offered to do it instead. Rindlisbacher felt she was pressuring him. “I’m going to have to ride with him and ask him a few questions,” he told her.

  Just before eight a.m., Reggie climbed into the passenger seat of the Crown Vic. He didn’t say anything.

  “You understand two guys died today,” the trooper said. Reggie nodded his acknowledgment.

  Rindlisbacher probed gently into what might’ve caused him to come across the median. Poked around, looking for an explanation. Reggie reiterated that he thought he’d hydroplaned. End of conversation.

  But that answer kept nagging at the trooper. Reggie’s SUV must have weighed four thousand pounds. It wouldn’t hydroplane unless it was going one hundred miles an hour. The witness, Kaiserman, said they were going fifty-five miles an hour, the speed limit. Plus, of no small significance, Kaiserman said he’d seen the Chevy swerve several times prior to the crash.

  A few seconds later, from the corner of his eye, Rindlisbacher saw Reggie reach into his jacket. The young man pulled out his phone. The ringer was on silent, but Rindlisbacher could see Reggie had gotten a text. Reggie replied to the message, and stuck the phone back in his pocket.

  Over the next few miles, Reggie did it four or five times. Something about it struck the trooper. “He did it with one hand, held the phone and texted with his thumb. He was a one-hander.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE TOLL

  LEILA O’DELL NEVER WORRIED about her husband, Keith. Why bother? He was good at everything. Carpentry, plumbing, tree pruning, and computers—especially computers. The basement in their North Logan home was an electronics graveyard that included Keith’s first Atari, an ancient model he’d sometimes pull out, disassemble, then solder back together as an improved version. His ATK Systems colleagues would come to him for computer advice rather than go to the IT department. Even among those powerful engineering minds, he stood out. His nickname was The Genius.

  ATK built rockets under a contract from NASA, which in 1999 awarded Keith the Silver Snoopy Award, a prestigious honor reserved for people who show great dedication in bringing safety to flight missions.

  But as capable as he was, Keith had an even bigger sense of duty. He was the man in the background who got things done. At his daughter Megan’s swim meets, he ran the computer that kept time and the score. And, at home, he was the guy with the tools.

  Leila thought of him as a do-everything guy. “A woman once asked me: ‘How do you get your husband to fix the plumbing?’ I said: ‘I just tell him the sink drips, and he takes care of it.’ ”

  One thing Keith didn’t do all that well was talk. He and Leila had met in high school in nearby Box Elder County, and ever since, they had walked, biked, and read together, and enjoyed each other’s company, often with few words exchanged. He brought out her joie
de vivre, a passion, an almost infectious laugh.

  Keith had been the product of a Protestant and a Catholic. Leila was Mormon. But they didn’t need what she thought of as the “social club” of church. They had each other. Politically, they were conservative, closer to libertarian than liberal.

  “We were just quiet people,” Leila sums it up. “It was never fireworks—just quiet, calm, efficient, responsible—and that just suited him.”

  Leila worked part-time as a bookkeeper with a heightened attention to detail; her memory for little things bordered on the photogenic. Friday, September 22 wasn’t a workday. She had planned to work in the yard, only to look outside to discover snow.

  She’d actually hoped Keith wouldn’t go to work that day. He’d been working so hard, dealing with a new contract. The night before, he hadn’t come home until 8:30, and went right down to his computer in the basement, at the desk strewn with computer discs, and started working again. She brought him leftover sweet-and-sour pork, and went upstairs and read until he joined her.

  Of course, that Friday, he didn’t heed Leila’s suggestion to take the day off. He worked; that’s what he did.

  AT ABOUT 9:40 A.M., Leila was still wearing her pajamas covered by a floor-length purple robe when the doorbell rang.

  She opened the door and discovered a local police officer and a sheriff. She immediately thought something must have happened to eighteen-year-old Megan, the girl Leila and Keith had adopted, taking her home from the hospital on Friday the 13th of May in 1988. Megan had been a daddy’s girl. But starting in high school, she started struggling with grades, turned away from her promising swimming talent, and, just generally, caused Leila ceaseless worry. The men stood with Leila just inside the doorway. They could hear the wind playing the chimes that hung just outside the front door.

  The law enforcement team explained to Leila that there had been an accident. She braced herself. The wreck involved a Saturn belonging to Jim Furfaro. There was a passenger, too, who they suspected could be Keith, but, well, the crash had been intense.