Distracted drivers remain a danger

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If you dislike sharing the road with cellphone-using drivers, you likely have had one of these: the moment you can’t let it pass any longer.

Maybe it happens when an SUV blows past your stopped car, nearly mowing down the pedestrian you’ve stopped for in the crosswalk. A few blocks later, you see the same driver texting — in a snowstorm. You make eye contact, you yell.

For Pat McGuinness, the moment was a bit more intense. Last week, in a letter to the editor, he revealed what it feels like to have killed someone while driving with distractions.

McGuinness is 56. He teaches economics part time at MacEwan University. He also owns a commercial cleaning business that causes him to rack up 30,000 kilometres of city driving a year. Every day, he sees dozens of horribly distracted drivers: the guy still stopped at the green light while cars behind him accelerate; the guy who suddenly veers out of his lane into yours; the grandmother on her phone with her grandchildren strapped in the back seat.

Every single day, McGuinness also remembers what it’s like to be one of those people when the odds narrow and luck runs out. Although it happened more than 15 years ago, when the Journal contacted him in response to his letter it was clear the horror and shame he feels will never go away.

“I was three blocks from home and I put my head down to fish a cassette tape out of my cubbyhole in my car, and I hit her. I felt the thud and thought, was that a dog? And then I thought, no Pat, that was a person. I pulled my car over and ran back. I’d knocked her into a ditch on the side of the road.

“And I found her and I was calling 911 and I was giving her first aid because I was a supervisor at Boeing and we all had to keep our first aid current. But …”

The 14-year-old girl who was walking with a friend on the shoulder of a road in suburban Everett, Wash., did not survive.

McGuinness was driving intoxicated that night. He served two years in prison for a vehicular homicide that occurred while he was .12 above the legal blood-alcohol limit. He hasn’t touched a drink since. In the past, he’s told his story to high school students, to warn them of the dangers of driving drunk. He hasn’t done such a talk in a while, but these days he would include a message about distracted driving, too, he says.

“I believe that if I’d had my head up, I would have seen them,” he says. “I was distracted by two things that night: alcohol and looking for a cassette tape.”

Weary of the cavalier attitude some Edmonton drivers have about using their phones while driving, he wrote that letter to the editor, in which he posed this pointed question: “If you kill someone with your car while texting or talking on your cellphone, are you going to feel any ‘better’ about it because you weren’t drunk?”

McGuinness was deported from the United States the same day his prison sentence ended. He lost his job, and many of his friends in the U.S.

But that is insignificant, he says, compared to the sorrow that he caused many others. He can’t forgive himself that. “I can’t emphasize enough how important the victims are,” he says. “I can’t begin to imagine how that little girl’s family feels.”

Worst of all is knowing that it was an avoidable incident. “I’ve always hesitated to use the word accident, because I’m an intelligent, well-educated, responsible individual and I should have known better. And so just exactly how is it an accident?”