Texting, driving, jailed: Iowa mom sorrows in causing man's death

Laura Maurer is a small-town Iowa wife and mother of two children who operates a hair salon. She hauls her daughter to dance classes, shops for groceries, schedules clients, fixes hair, runs the books.

She found texting on her mobile phone cumbersome, but life had sped up. So the 40-year-old busy mom from Brooklyn, Ia., fumbled around and learned, not knowing that the habit would one day be deadly.

Two years ago, she was driving home after work. She had left her shop in Grinnell, finished an appointment with a financial adviser and was heading home to get groceries, but she first had to stop at a client’s home to gather a payment because the client had forgotten her credit card that day.

Her mind was on groceries, on financial advice, on making sure to communicate. She pulled over on the side of the road, Maurer said, and fired off a text message, telling the client she was on the way to get the payment, before steering back onto County Road F-29 near Brooklyn.

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A couple of minutes passed. Her mobile phone dinged with a message. She drove. Her phone dinged again. She drove. Her phone dinged a third time. She reached over to the phone in the console, opened the message and scanned it.

“Oh s---“ were the first message’s first words.

Scan, scan …

“I totally forgot…”

Scan, scan….

“… granddaughter is here…”

Maurer looked up. Right in front of her car, near the side of the road, was Marvin Beck, a Malcom father and grandfather, sitting atop a small tractor pulling a tiller. She slammed on the brakes and swerved.

But it was too late.

Maurer's story appeared on CNN in early August during a report on distracted driving. She doesn’t want the attention and says she lost a lot of herself since the 2014 accident. She doesn’t want pity for the suffering — sleepless nights in a jail cell wondering what she had done, anguish for the victim’s family members whom she knew and went to church with in the small town.

But she will talk about it in the hope that one person puts down the damn phone and pays attention to driving.

Distracted driving is not waning, even with all the attention to the problem in the last few years, experts say. Statistics suggest it’s getting worse.

In Iowa, 1,100 crashes were caused by distracted driving in 2015, 329 more than the year before and more than double the number from 2001. Fourteen people died and 601 were injured in 2015, nearly double the 2014 number for both.

Iowa has some of the weakest laws in the nation to enforce the use of electronic devices while driving. It is one of five states where adult motorists can't be stopped if officers see them texting, unless officers have another reason to pull them over. The Legislature hasn't acted to make changes, although some legislators have called for stricter laws, and Gov. Terry Branstad has urged more focus on the problem.

When Iowa Department of Public Safety officials scan the accident reports so far this year, they aren’t encouraged. Sgt. Nathan Ludwig of the Iowa State Patrol said a majority of the 235 traffic fatalities through the middle of August were likely caused by texting and driving, although final investigations are not complete and, for most, there is no firm way to prove it. But comments on the reports of a driver veering off the road lead them to believe it’s from a distraction.

The weekly reports have weighed heavy on Ludwig’s mind, so one recent day he counted the number of drivers looking at or fiddling with their smart phones while turning left at an intersection on Meredith Drive near Urbandale. He counted five of 10 drivers, so he counted again the next day. Six of 10.

For more anecdotal evidence, look no further than Guido Miller. He is a trucker from Iowa. Every day from his vantage point high in the cab, he sees people doing everything but driving. Some people even have their legs curled up below them as they zip down the freeway on cruise control, texting with both hands on the phone.

“I use my horn to get their attention,” he said.

Bicyclists are increasingly scared, especially after hearing reports of riders mowed down from behind this summer.

“I hear them saying they need to see what is behind them,” said Frank Owens of Bike World in West Des Moines, noting a marked increase in sales of rear-view mirrors.

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Maurer’s car barreled into the back end of Beck’s tiller, ejecting him from the Cub Cadet tractor seat and into a steep ditch.

“I ran to him and called 911,” Maurer said, crying. “He got up with my help, pushed off me, and got up. I told him to lay down, and he laid in my arms.”

Neighbors arrived and soon emergency workers tended to Beck. Maurer got in the back of the police car and later was told Beck didn’t make it. She remembers telling the officer: “I looked down at my damn phone.”

Beck died at age 75. He was a lifelong farmer, father of four and grandfather to 11.

“He was just a plain-spoken, simple man,” said his wife, Ruth. “He wasn’t an ‘outish’ person. He just did all he could for his family and his kids. He did his best.

“We all got together at holidays and family events, and all the values of farming he passed down to all of his children and grandchildren. That’s how he lived.”

Ruth Beck didn’t want to talk about Maurer or the accident. She only said that the law hasn’t caught up with technology.

“When you are taking a life, how do you handle it?” she said.

Maurer didn’t handle it well. She went into a shell and couldn’t eat or sleep. A citation was issued, and then she later appeared in court, pleading guilty to distracted driving. She was sentenced to 14 days in jail and 200 hours of community service.

“I mourned him more than my own grandparents,” she said.

It’s not as if public officials and private organizations aren’t trying to wake up Iowans to the danger of distracted driving.

State Farm donated driving simulators to educators that show how easy it is to crash while texting. Organizations such as AAA and Unity Point Health have teamed up on an education program called One Second! to tell drivers how quickly an accident can happen while distracted.

Iowa State troopers staffed a booth at the Iowa State Fair and provided presentations on texting and driving at two stages on two separate days. And the Department of Transportation’s Zero Fatalities program pushes education efforts, including a new highway sign the DOT erected: “Get Your Head Out of Your Apps.”

If every family had zero tolerance for use of electronic devices in a vehicle, “we could end it,” said Tracey Bramble, a DOT information specialist.

Young drivers are often the focus of these campaigns. Doug Cutts of the Iowa State Patrol visits driver’s education classes with golf carts and has young drivers try to text and go through a course. He said it opens students' eyes to how dangerous it is.

“But this generation still thinks you need to use your phone at all times,” he said. “No, you don’t.”

Novice drivers are banned from using a cell phone, and all drivers are banned from texting, reading or sending a message. But the latter is a secondary offense, meaning law enforcement can’t stop motorists whom they see doing it unless there's another cause to justify a stop, such as a broken taillight.

In 2015, there were only 127 violations issued for texting while driving in Iowa. In Minnesota, there were nearly 1,000 citations issued in one week last April. Texting while driving had been a secondary offense in Minnesota, as it is in Iowa, but Minnesota changed its law to a primary offense in 2015.

“We are seeing distracted driving as a major cause of crashes in our state — everything from playing Pokémon to using Snapchat and everything else that continues to grow on the cell phone, and it’s not going to get better if more action is not taken,” said Patrick Hoye, bureau chief of the Iowa Governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau.

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Nationally, 3,179 people were killed and 431,000 injured by distracted driving in 2014, the latest year for which figures are available from the National Transportation Safety Board.

The NTSB reports that it takes 4.6 seconds to scan a message, and in that time a car can travel the length of a football field.

Sen. Tod Bowman, a Democrat from Maquoketa and chairman of the Transportation Committee, has sponsored a bill to make texting and driving a primary offense, but the bill hasn’t advanced the last two sessions. He plans to file it again next year.

“I have three children. They share the road with these people texting and driving,” he said. “I drive to Des Moines often, and there is hardly a trip where I don’t see someone weaving because they are texting and driving.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa opposes a stricter law. Its officials say making texting and driving a primary offense might make the roads more dangerous by encouraging people to lower their hands and eyes to hide detection by police, and would give police one more reason for racially discriminatory traffic stops.

Maurer went to church before her scheduled prison sentence last August but found it nearly unbearable. Beck’s sons attend the church.

“I remember feeling sorry for them, having to see me there,” she said.

When she entered the county jail in nearby Montezuma on Aug. 3, 2015, she was told to take off all her clothes and put on a jumpsuit. She said she was put in a cell with a mentally ill woman and couldn’t sleep. Every night, she called her children, a 14-year old daughter and 11-year-old son “who thought only bad people went to jail.”

She did feel like a bad person and lay awake in the dark cell.

“How did I get here?” she asked herself.

The answer became clear, and she grew determined to take action, both to fulfill her community service requirement but also to feed her need to save at least one person. When she got out of jail, she told her story to school groups and one day picked up the phone to offer her story to the Zero Fatalities program at the DOT. CNN saw the report and came out to do a story on her.

“It hasn’t been easy, putting my story out there,” she said. “But I hope I can change the way people drive. Driving has become a secondary task. You feel like you can do it in your sleep, but you can’t. You never know what is over the hill or around the corner.”

She feels ashamed of sharing her suffering, but does so to highlight the consequences.

“The guilt of taking his life … has changed me forever,” she said. “Part of me died — my confidence. I was an outgoing person before. Not so much anymore. I try to make sense of why it had to happen.”

That pales in comparison, she knows, to the suffering of Ruth Beck, who remains stoic.

“I have other things to think about now,” Beck said. “I have to keep this farm going. I’m gradually learning. It happened, and we have to move on.”