The very last thing that 59-year-old Michele Guglielmi of Hempstead allegedly ever did was send a text message.
The Nassau County Homicide Squad said he was texting right before he crashed his car in Garden City on Oct. 3.
The police say he jumped the median and crashed into a tree. He was dead on arrival when EMS took him to the hospital. Fortunately no one else was injured.
What will it take to convince drivers that texting and other use of a cell phone while driving is extremely dangerous?
If you are driving at 55 mph, in the five seconds that it takes to send a text message, your car will travel the length of a football field. The same holds true for picking up a cell phone that has fallen to the floor of a car.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association, a texting driver is 23 times more likely to get into an accident that a non-texting driver. In 2009, 995 of the crashes resulting in a fatality involved a driver distracted by a cell phone.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Association says using a cell phone – not just texting – slows down a driver’s reflexes as much as driving with a blood alcohol concentration of .08 percent, the legal limit for intoxication.
In 2011, 49 percent of drivers responding to a Harris survey said they had read or responded to a text while driving. That’s a frightening statistic.
These drivers put not just everyone in their cars, but everyone on the road in danger.
The poll also reports that 60 percent of the drivers admitted that they used cell phones while driving. These same drivers told Harris that they consider themselves better-than-average divers.
At the same time the teenagers responding to Harris admitted that using a cell phone while driving is dangerous.
The message about using a cell phone and texting while driving is not getting through. While 10 years ago this was primarily a problem among teen drivers, increasingly police are seeing adults like Michele Guglielmi looking at their phones when they should be looking at the road.
Although drunk driving remains a major cause of highway accidents and fatalities, it is not socially acceptable. Everyone knows it is dangerous, illegal and morally wrong.
But people don’t feel the same about texting and using cell phones while driving. And yet this may be even more dangerous.
