Texting Your Way to Tragedy

In a follow-up to this post describing an accident in which five cheerleaders were killed in a terrible crash in New York, the police are suggesting that the driver may have been sending text messages on her phone at the time of the crash:

(July 14) - Text messages were sent and received on a 17-year-old driver's cell phone moments before the sport utility vehicle slammed head-on into a truck, killing her and four other recent high school graduates, police said.

Bailey Goodman was driving her friends to her parents' vacation home when her SUV, which had just passed a car, swerved back into oncoming traffic, hit a tractor-trailer and burst into flames. Five days earlier, the five teenagers had graduated together from high school in Fairport, a Rochester suburb.

Goodman's inexperience at the wheel; evidence she was driving above the speed limit at night on a winding, two-lane highway; and a succession of calls and text messages on her phone were cited Friday by Sheriff Phil Povero as possible factors in the June 28 crash in western New York.

"The records indicate her phone was in use," Povero said. "We will never be able to clearly state that she was the one doing the text messaging. ... We all certainly know that cell phones are a distraction and could be a contributing factor in this accident."

DWT (driving while texting) is becoming more and more common among teens whose fingers can fly over the keyboard and produce messages at a high rate. I've seen kids doing it and you can tell they're distracted by the way they look up and then back to their phones over and over. Why you would text the person in the other car rather than just call them, I don't know, but in this case it certainly didn't work out well.