Cellphones can maim and kill

Do you remember being 11?

I do, even though it was decades ago.

I think of it as the time of the last clear window of childish wonder — before everything got complicated with puberty and junior high and everything beyond.

A time when it was possible to just lie on your back on the living room floor and watch small motes of dust cycle through sunlight streaming through the window, without having to be worrying about the time you’re wasting and the things you should be doing instead.

Hold that image for a second.

The next one comes from a judge’s verdict in Victoria, B.C., and it’s nowhere near as pleasant.

“On December 20, 2017 at approximately 8:15 in the morning, the accused, driving a black Mercedes SUV, struck L.B. while she was in a crosswalk, crossing Ash Road at the corner of Ash Road and Torquay Drive. Miss L.B. was 11 years old at the time of the accident. Miss L.B. was thrown a significant distance before coming to a stop, wedged under another vehicle. Sadly, as a result of the impact, she suffered catastrophic injuries including severe brain damage, a fractured neck and lacerated spleen,” Judge Mayland Mckimm wrote in a judgment released last Monday.

I know that intersection well: it’s just a few blocks down Torquay Drive from where my parents bought a house in Victoria after they retired. I’ve crossed on that crosswalk, and I know that Ash Road is a clear straight shot in both directions at that point, though a thoroughfare; people do go fast. The crosswalk is clearly marked. It’s a quiet neighbourhood; like a lot of Victoria, its demographic seems tilted towards the elderly.

The driver, in her 20s, had passed two cars in the residential neighbourhood, with dashcam evidence showing she’d reached 90 kilometres an hour to 100 km/h in a 50 km/h zone. Evidence in the case showed that Tenessa Nikirk had been tailgating other drivers for more than five kilometres before the accident occurred. She’d pulled out and passed cars two at a time.

And she was still going fast enough at the point of impact that it took her almost 20 metres to bring her car to a stop.

But on top of everything, she was texting.

In the 12 minutes before the accident, she’d sent or received 23 text messages in a back-and-forth conversation with another person.

As the judge found, “The accused was speeding, not paying adequate attention to clearly visible markers at the crosswalk, the child and the stopped vehicles, and was engaged in conversations with other parties by way of a handheld electronic device. Because of that, she failed to see that which is plainly there to be seen.”

Nikirk was convicted of dangerous driving causing bodily harm.

That’s the problem with cellphones and driving, particularly texting: you are somewhere else, and you fail to see that which is plainly there to be seen.

Until all of a sudden, you’re seeing something horrible

— something horrible that your behaviour has caused. I don’t know how a person can live with themselves after causing something like that. I couldn’t.

Driving?

Put the phone down. Perhaps it’s time to start talking about some sort of interlock device — like the sort we use for people convicted of drunk driving, where they have to blow into the device to prove that they’re not impaired before they can start their vehicle.

A device that won’t let you drive unless the driver’s phone is either turned off or put on “do not disturb.”

Because I don’t have any faith that people will stop using their phones otherwise.