Kristy Rexrode doesn?t need to read about the perils of text messaging while driving a vehicle.
She?s all too familiar with its tragic consequences. Her 58-year-old father, Robert ?Bobby? Woosley, died two summers ago in a car accident on Highway 501 near Brookneal, Va., the town he lived in.
A 21-year-old driver traveling in the opposite direction on the highway crossed over the double yellow line, slamming into Woosley?s pickup truck. He died within hours, as did the young woman driving the car.
The accident happened at 8:05 a.m., and when the police checked her cell phone, she had started a text message to her boyfriend at 8:03 and it was never finished,? said Rexrode, 35.
The driver ?hit my father head-on and his truck caught on fire. Luckily, a bystander was able to pull him from his truck before it burned. He had melted parts of the dash on his shoes.?
Think about those images staying in your head forever. Think about the loss to two families of people they loved. Think about the Los Angeles Metrolink train crash Sept. 12 that killed 25 people, and injured more than 130 others, and the train engineer who was text-messaging that day, and who also lost his life.
When I wrote about that accident early last week, and the issue of ?driving while distracted? by text messaging while behind the wheel, e-mails poured in. They generally fell into three categories: 1) Outrage over the issue; 2) Disbelief that drivers can or would do both; and 3) Anger that the engineer was being blamed before a full investigation was done.
Early indications were that the engineer, Robert Sanchez, may have been texting at the time the train ran head-on into a freight train.
Since last week, California?s Public Utilities Commission passed an emergency order banning the use of cell phones and other personal electronic devices for anyone operating a train.
Also, the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident, said it received some records of Sanchez? cell phone calls and text messages, ?which indicate that the engineer had sent and received text messages on the day of the accident, including some while he was on duty.?
The board will look at those records ?with other investigative information to determine as precisely as possible the exact times of those messages in relation to the engineer?s operation of his train,? the NTSB said in a statement.
