Homer's got you beat.
Posted on 04/26/2014 3:37:44 PM PDT by csvset
High Point police say the woman who died in a head-on collision Thursday was posting selfies and updating her Facebook status moments before the fatal crash. Courtney Ann Sanford, 32, of Clemmons, updated her Facebook status with: “The happy song makes me HAPPY” one minute before the crash was called in to police, investigators say.
“These posts were brought to investigators’ attention by family and friends,” said Lt. Charles Lanier with the High Point Police Dept. “Investigators say that she also was taking pictures of herself while driving. The posts were very close proximity in time to our first calls on the crash.”
Lanier said that the Facebook status update was posted at 8:33 a.m. Police and rescue workers were called to the crash at 8:34 a.m.
Sanford was heading north on Business 85 at Baker Road when her 2005 Toyota Corolla crossed the median into oncoming traffic. Her car slammed into a company-owned truck that was headed southbound. The crash shut down the highway for several hours. Police say it appeared that Sanford died upon impact.
North Carolina outlawed texting and driving in December 2009 and, although the law does not specifically mention Facebook and Twitter, the law says drivers may not “manually enter multiple letters or text in the (mobile telephone) as a means of communicating with another person.”
Lanier said that Sanford’s death serves as a reminder about distracted driving. “You’ve got to pay attention on the road,” he said. “There’s so much going on, you can’t afford to be looking down at a phone or a computer or taking pictures of yourself. That takes a great deal of attention off of what you’re doing. Nothing is worse than losing your life or the life of someone else to tell people how you’re doing.”
jhowse@hpe.com | 888-3617
If you look down to text for five seconds while driving at moderate speed... you are traveling the length of a football field... totally blind.
Facebook = An Eighth-commandment free codependency of narcissists and voyeurs.
It’s only a few months old.
... Police say it appeared that Sanford died upon impact.
Well at least she died happy.
The fools with the electronic pacifier will kill us all.
“smart phones” are evil and the lazy politicians refuse to make such activity while driving illegal because it’d be “unpopular” legislation.
Homer's got you beat.
I love the scene in national Lampoon’s Vacation when they are driving at night and the camera pans through the car revealing that everyone is asleep, including Chevy Chase(Clark Griswold) who is supposed to be driving.
His one in a million perfect parking job in the motel parking lot is great.
One of the maybe 10 scenes in movies and TV that gave me an honest belly laugh. They’re pretty rare really.
I agree, they are so darn heedless, it is a shame about all the destruction
Drunk driving is illegal but the law hasn’t stopped DUIs
The only thing DUI laws have accomplished is to increase the pool of violators from those who cause accidents while (or by) being drunk to those who only might do so.
Flame on.
0.01, 0.03, and 0.08 aren’t where the accidents occur but there is zero tolerance.
Cellphone f*ckers nearly broke my neck with ZERO medical reimbursement.
They gotta be all plugged in at 10am because they are so gosh damned important.
Sure. It gets kind of dull, sometimes, with just me and the pets.
There have been some studies that suggest that distracted driving, especially driving while texting is actually more dangerous than driving under the influence. That’s not to say that drunk driving is OK, and the distinction should be noted between having a BAC at or slightly above the legal limit and being pie-eyed drunk or drugged out of one’s skull. But a driver who may be slightly impaired, while their reaction times and judgment is reduced, they are typically trying to pay attention to the road, perhaps even more so than usual. But a driver who is looking down at their cell phone either to send or read a text or emails or posting on social media, is totally oblivious to the road and other drivers around them.
Yes, you go a long distance, the length of a football field in five seconds at moderate speed. Imagine closing your eyes for five seconds while driving – same thing.
I am amazed how many drivers I see on the road driving with their cell phones in hand and texting. There was a guy behind me just last week doing it and he appeared to be a middle aged guy, probably a business man. He nearly rammed into me at a red light. Of course it’s not just cell phones, other distractions are dangerous like the guy I saw on I-95 one morning with a newspaper draped over his steering wheel, a man eating a bowl of what looked like raman noodles with chopsticks no less and the woman tailgating me who was, no I’m not making this up, flossing her teeth.
I love my smart phone and I do use it for GPS driving directions, but I set the route before I leave the house and I put the phone in a cradle on my dashboard so I don’t have to look down at it or even look at it at all with the voice directions. I don’t read or answer texts while driving and in fact I don’t talk on the phone while driving, for one thing I drive a manual transmission car so holding a phone up to my ear, if I need to shift, means my other hand can’t be on the steering wheel and even using the blue tooth headset with voice commands is too much of a PITA and a distraction. I usually leave my phone in my purse and if someone calls or texts me, I don’t even know until I’ve reached my destination and usually it’s not important or something that can’t wait.
Speaking of that, if you have about thirty minutes (and are not in your car driving) watch this:
From One Second To The Next" A Film By Werner Herzog- It can wait
This should be required watching for anyone who has a cell phone and has ever texted while driving. It might not prevent people from still doing it, but it might stop some. Put the phone away while in the car. It can wait.
Is that Amy Farrah Fowler? Sheldon Cooper will be crushed! Well, crushed may be a strong word.
is to enrich defense attorneys, SCRAM monitoring companies, and the medical/judicial complex.
No flames from me...a 30+ year law enforcement veteran.
Bad writing can be grammatically correct. It was two things:
Paragraph four starting with "Sanford...", the short, choppy staccato cadence of that paragraph reads like high school journalism.
Then the next paragraph seems to contradict the style of paragraph four by being a run-on sentence.
Journalism has deteriorated a lot, it seems, in recent years. The whole piece sounded to me like it was written by someone who was under pressure to meet a deadline and did not bother to reread it for style and flow.
I got a Mrs. and an adorable, amazingly dispositioned baby. That should liven things up. ;-)
I’m surprised the “Happy Song” has not crossed my radar. Lots of other pointless pop culture does.
I use FB a lot. It is how I get news of family and friends. If it were not for it, I would not know about deaths, new babies, etc. I do not understand why anyone uses a phone when driving. I go to see relatives in another state frequently and when I get in the car, I turn mine off. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, it can wait until I get to where I am going. I am not a phone lover. I do not understand the hatred for FB. If you do not want to use it fine but there are plenty of us who do.
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