FATAL DISTRACTION
A five-part Postmedia series on the deadliest threat of our connected lives
• Laura Tardif ’s story comes together in fragments.
There is the empty bedroom in the basement of a house by the river. Or the picture that hangs above the dinner table: Laura smiling as she tugs on her scarf.
Then there is Laura’s mother, Claudie Landry, sitting at the family computer on a muggy August afternoon, scrolling through the digital footprint her child left behind.
She opens a video of Laura sporting a white karate gi in the middle of a high school gymnasium. As she fights her way across the computer screen, Laura isn’t much bigger than a paper clip. Her younger sister, Anne, watches over Claudie’s shoulder, placing a hand on her mother’s back.
There is another, colder fragment of Laura’s story — a coroner’s report that details the 18-year-old’s final moments: It’s 8: 14 p. m. on June 21, 2014, and Laura is driving her Mazda 3 north on Route de la Station in L’Isle-Verte.
She sends a text message to her friend. Two minutes later, a reply comes buzzing on Laura’s iPhone and she opens the messages.
The car approaches a rail crossing at the crest of a hill. The crossing’s red lights flash, its bells clang and the oncoming locomotive sounds its whistle four times.
But Laura never slows down. The train barrels into Laura’s car at 64 kilometres an hour.
The coroner concludes Laura didn’t see the train coming because she was using her mobile phone. It is a story unfolding across the country — in the back of speeding ambulances, on operating tables and in smouldering wrecks along the sides of highways.
Distracted driving is believed to be among the leading factors in fatal collisions in Canada. In a survey two years ago of police and groups that combat distracted driving, 76 per cent said the previous five years of data showed distraction had been responsible for a greater percentage of road fatalities than impaired driving.
Fines for using your cellphone behind the wheel range from $ 80 to $ 1,500 across Canada, with drivers facing between three and five demerit points. Experts say these measures aren’t enough.
Dr. Tarek Razek is a Montreal trauma surgeon. He said it’s alarming how commonly he operates on people who, moments earlier, were texting and driving. “It happens every day,” he said. “Over the years, as we’ve seen a decline in patients who come in because of impaired driving, we’re seeing more and more people who were on their phone during a collision. It’s scary.”
In Fatal Distraction, Postmedia examines the escalating threat of talking and texting behind the wheel, and why Canad ians do it. The five- part series explores the extent of the problem in Canada today, and why legislators need to focus on this lethal issue. It also looks at the scientific dimensions of our digital addictions, and the competitive forces at work by wireless companies and automakers to maintain the status quo.
Today, a look at the emotional toll of distracted driving, and the too-high costs for two families in different parts of the country. John Boden’s hands twitch as he clings to the walker for support. His feet move like they’re tethered to concrete blocks, inching forward in slow, painful steps.
For the next 10 minutes, the 55- year- old father of three will summon an Olympian’s focus simply to push the walker a few hundred metres as he lumbers along the hallways of St. Mary’s Hospital in Camrose, Alta.
The walk caps off another of Boden’s physiotherapy sessions — an hour of stretches, light weightlifting and callisthenics to prevent his muscles from degenerating further. When it’s over, he’ll sit back in his wheelchair for the rest of the day.
It’s been nine years since the crash that altered the course of Boden’s life — a head-on car collision caused by a teenage driver who had sent a text message moments earlier.
Boden doesn’t remember seeing the Dodge Ram as it drifted across the centre lane and into his path. But he recalls the sound of the collision: the explosion of glass and crumpled steel. “I’ ll never forget that for as long as I live,” he said. “It was an awful sound. It haunts you.”
Highway 13 slices through central Alberta. It straddles thick marshland to the south, while on the road’s northern flank, the fields spill into each other over a horizon that seems to meld with the sky. It was in this eerily typical piece of Western Canada, on a warm evening in May 2007, that Boden’s life was changed.
The truck sliced through the front of his Chevrolet convertible, then rolled and skipped along the highway. The truck ejected its passenger, a 17- yearold girl, into the ditch, breaking her femur and pelvis.
Boden, still pinned in the driver’s seat, recalled listening to the teen scream.
Investigators would conclude the truck’s teenage driver had looked away from the road to send her text message before the crash.
When the firefighters came to pull Boden from his car, he said, his body felt alien to him. “I looked over and I could see my hand on the gearshift. But it felt like it was in my lap,” he said. “I asked one of the first people on the scene, I said, ‘Charlie, could you lift my hand up?’ So he lifted it up and it was really eerie watching someone lift your hand up and still feel the hand in your lap. I didn’t feel it move at all.”
Immediately, Boden worried about what to tell his wife, Shauna. He called out to one of the bystanders gathered around his car. The man dialed Shauna’s number on his cellphone and pressed the device to Boden’s ear.
“I told her I’d be on my way to the hospital, riding in an ambu- lance, and that I was OK,” he said. “But I knew I wasn’t OK.” It didn’t seem real at first, when the officers knocked at Claudie Landry’s door in Quebec to tell her that her daughter was dead.
“You try to find a way out. You think, ‘It’s not her, you’ve made a mistake. Where is she?’ There are so many questions stirring in your mind,” Claudie said.
“I could actually feel my heart sink, I could feel a numbness overtake my body.”
The day before Laura died, she wrote a math exam to earn the final credits she needed to go to college.
Laura had struggled to grasp mathematics throughout high school, but she enrolled in adult education at 17 with a renewed sense of purpose. Her mother says she breezed through the final exam, notching a 96 per cent.
In two months, she’d begin interior design classes at Cégep de Rivière- du- Loup and Laura would have her hands full that summer waitressing at the local golf course.
That evening, though, Laura was having fun.
It was the first day of summer and she was visiting her new boyfriend in Saint- Éloi. Afterwards, she’d stop by her grandparents’ house before meeting up with her friends at a rodeo in nearby Saint-Antonin.
She left her boyfriend’s place around 8 p. m. and drove along the country roads that would lead her back home. Less than 15 minutes into the drive, a friend texted her about their plans to meet later that night.
What happened s hortly thereafter was caused in part, investigators later told Claudie and her husband, André, by spectacularly bad timing.
Had Laura’s car arrived at the rail crossing just 2.5 seconds later, they said, it would have sailed passed the train and the 18-year-old would still be alive.
The t rain was about 45 metres long — two locomotives bound for Rivière- du- Loup. By the time the conductor saw Laura’s Mazda 3, it was too late.
Even with i ts emergency br akes activated, the train plowed into the compact car and pushed it for 300 metres before coming to a stop.
There were other factors that may have contributed to the collision. As Laura approached the rail crossing, the sun faded into the mountains across the St. Lawrence River, reflecting orange light off its glassy surface and obscuring visibility.
The crossing also lacked a
Before his crash, John Boden was an active man — he played hockey, coached youth baseball and took his daughters on camping trips.
An old family photo depicts a stout, broad- shouldered Boden sporting a pair of shorts that reveal his muscular legs. He had the physique of a man who spent his life working; one who tilled the fields on his parents’ farm, who shovelled gravel and drove a dump truck on the back roads of central Alberta.
On the day of the crash, Boden was driving to a baseball game to see some local kids compete. His daughters were not playing, he just wanted to be outside and enjoy the company of neighbours on a warm spring evening.
When the truck plowed into Boden’s car, it took that life away.
“It helps if you picture my spine as a kinked hose,” Boden said, when he described his injury in layman’s terms. “The messages from my brain don’t quite make it to my muscles. And my muscles sometimes move and spasm involuntarily; they work against me.”
Boden spent months in a hospital bed before beginning a slow, painful recovery. He couldn’t dress himself, shower or perform other basic tasks without the help of his wife or a health-care aide.
Boden said he didn’t like to think of what was lost that day. The crash could have torn Boden and Shauna apart. That’s what the doctors told them early in the recovery process.
“They didn’t sugar- coat it, they said that when a husband or wife is paralyzed, something like 85 per cent of couples divorce,” Shauna said. “But I think because of the way John is — because he didn’t get angry, he didn’t hold grudges, he didn’t start drinking — I think that made it a lot easier on us.
“We had hard times. There were times I was angry that he wasn’t angry. But in the end, we made it work.”
In order to care for Boden, Shauna all but gave up her job as a nurse in the psychiatric ward at St. Mary’s. Boden said she never complained about the sacrifices she made for him. “She’s an extraordinary person,” he said. “I can’t stress that enough.”
Boden began to tour high schools i n Western Canada throughout the year, speaking to kids about his injury.
“I’m not mad at the driver. She never set out to hurt me; she has to live with what she did that day,” he said. “I don’t want to wreck her life, I just don’t want this to happen to other people.
“Seeing me in the chair, I think it shakes some of the kids up. So I try to make them laugh,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many wheelchair jokes I’ve memorized over the years.
“The message is pretty simple: We’ve changed our attitude toward seatbelts, toward drunk driving; let’s change our attitude about phones. I’ ll say, ‘ Tell your parents,’ say, ‘ Mom, Dad, can you put the phone away for five minutes?’ As a parent, how do you say no to that?” The reality of Laura’s death sunk in through small, painful changes to the Tardif family routine.
“One day, you’re setting four plates at the dinner table and the next it’s three,” said Claudie. “I started locking the front door before going to bed. I never used to do that because Laura would be out with her friends.”
Two days after the crash, Claudie and Laura’s sister, Anne, curled up on the couch and watched the season premiere of the TV show Teen Wolf.
“It seems silly, but it’s something the three of us girls used to do together, it was our show,” said Claudie.
Laura’s room is much like it was before the crash. Her bed is made. Her karate gi dangles from a wire hanger in the closet.
There’s also a photo collage Laura affixed to the wall next to her dresser. It captures the life of an outgoing teenager: Laura at the lake with friends, Laura in a formal dress, Laura making a funny face, Laura in her high school graduation gown.
On the dresser is an urn that holds her remains.
It was months after Boden and his wife had spoken with Postmedia that an unexpected call came.
Shauna’s voice cracked as she delivered the news. “John passed away,” she said. “It was peaceful.”
He died in his sleep. Boden was in the Northwest Territor- ies with Shauna and his caretaker, preparing to lead a high school assembly about texting and driving.
The caretaker found Boden lying in his hotel bed. His heart had stopped beating sometime in the night. It’s unclear whether the spinal injury was a factor in his death.
Two weeks before, the couple had purchased a plot of land near the centre of Camrose.
Building a home in town represented a new beginning. They’d be closer to friends and a social life.
“We were going to build an elevator for John, ramps, the sort of things that would have made it a bit easier on us,” said Shauna. “I’m happy John will know where I am. I don’t know if that sounds strange, but it’s comforting to me that John knows where I’ll be.” Last June, the Tardif family returned to the train tracks in L’Isle-Verte, where Laura died.
The rails trace a line from a strawberry field by the highway to a knoll that overlooks the water. They pass a barn and a rusted- out fishing boat before arriving at the crash site. Below the hilltop, the St. Lawrence River widens into the sea.
After she died, the family planted a wooden cross next to the tracks. They carved Laura’s name into it and laid flowers at the foot of the cross.
The wound isn’t as fresh as it once was, but Claudie recalls the emotions of that day. “The train passed and it blew its whistle,” she said. “In a way it was like reliving the pain from that day all over again.
“But it also felt like Laura was sending us a message, like she was letting us know she was there.”