She texted about dinner while driving. Then a pedestrian was dead

One woman was out for a walk and a taste of fresh air during a break from her job as a scientist at a New Jersey fragrance manufacturer. She and her husband had been trying to get pregnant, and brief bouts of exercise, away from the laboratory’s smells and fumes, were part of that plan.

A second woman was behind the wheel of a black Mercedes-Benz, headed to work as chief executive of a nonprofit in a city that had once lauded her as civic leader of the year for her extensive work with troubled youth.

Their lives collided with devastating speed in the coastal town of Keansburg just before 8:20 on a Wednesday morning, leaving the woman out for a walk fatally injured and the driver facing a charge of vehicular homicide, accused of texting while driving.

On Friday, a jury found the driver, Alexandra Mansonet, guilty of vehicular homicide in a case that was believed to be the first time a New Jersey jury was asked to apply a 2012 law that places texting while driving on par with drunken driving.

The case has focused attention on the nationwide crisis of distracted driving, as well as how rare and difficult prosecutions can be.

“It’s a relatively new issue,” said Kara Macek, a spokeswoman for the national Governors Highway Safety Association. “In fatal crashes, it’s much more difficult to obtain evidence that a driver was distracted.”

Mansonet’s car had ploughed into the back of a Toyota Corolla not far from her home, just past a bridge that crosses over a creek that spills into the nearby bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The Corolla then hit the woman who had been out for a walk, sending her flying into the air.

Mansonet, 50, testified that she had looked down to turn on a rear-window defogger just before the Sept 28, 2016, crash. “I looked up and the car was right in front of me,” she said.

She faces up to 10 years in prison when she is sentenced.

When the foreman of the jury, which had deliberated for 2 1/2 days, read the one-word verdict, “guilty,” Mansonet placed her left hand to her face and breathed deeply while family members behind her wept. She cried as she exited the courtroom.

Her lawyer, Steven Altman, noted how commonplace texting while driving has become. “It’s going to be very difficult for her to deal with the fact that at sentencing she could be incarcerated for something we are all guilty of doing on a daily basis,” he said.

The pedestrian, Yuwen Wang, died days after the collision at a hospital that is next to the courthouse in New Brunswick where she and her husband, Steven Qiu, had said their vows six years earlier. The couple had celebrated their anniversary the night before the crash.

Qiu said he and his family were comforted by the verdict. “I’m really grateful,” he said, adding, “I hope more people could realise the consequences of texting while driving.”

His wife’s final words to him came in the form of a cheerful but mundane farewell. “Have a good day,” Qiu recalled her saying.

The text at the heart of the trial was equally ordinary in a culture where streams of shorthand mobile phone messages have become ingrained in modern life. “Cuban, American or Mexican. Pick one,” Mansonet’s former sister-in-law had texted to ask about her preference for dinner choices, the assistant prosecutor, Christopher Decker, said in court.

Where and when Mansonet read the text, and when she began to tap out a reply, became central to the trial in Monmouth County Superior Court in Freehold. The prosecutor argued that the unsent text — the letters “m” and “e” — were the start of a response about her dinner choice.

Mansonet willingly turned her phone over to the police after the crash, Altman said before the verdict. Had she been using her phone to text at the time of the crash, Altman said, “all she had to do was delete it.”

Mansonet, in testimony, conceded that she had typed the letters “m” and “e” but said she did not remember when. “I thought, ‘I’m going to call her up because I don’t know if I want Mexican,’” she testified.

Wang, 39, was originally from Taiwan and had recently earned her PhD in New Jersey, her husband said. She is among the increasing number of pedestrians killed annually; last year, the nationwide pedestrian death toll of 6,283 approached a three-decade high.

New York, in 2001, became the first state to outlaw driver mobile phone use.

Five years later, the deaths of two scientists in Utah in a texting-related crash helped fuel a nationwide push for stricter laws.

Last year, there were 73 drivers nationwide involved in fatal crashes who were identified as distracted and were charged with crimes unrelated to traffic violations, according to a National Safety Council analysis of data provided by the traffic safety administration.

New Jersey state law was amended in 2012 to add the use of hand-held devices to the list of behaviours that may be interpreted as criminally “reckless” and could constitute vehicular homicide.

But the Monmouth County case is thought to be the only one of a handful of texting-linked vehicular-homicide charges since then to reach trial, according to two past presidents of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey. Some drivers originally charged with vehicular homicide pleaded guilty to less serious offenses; one woman died before her case reached trial.

One female juror declined to talk about the verdict or the closed-door discussions as she left court.

“This is a tragedy in every respect,” Monmouth County’s prosecutor, Christopher Gramiccioni, said. “Texting while driving puts drivers and pedestrians in grave danger, and we are hopeful that the jury’s verdict will reinforce the public’s awareness of this risk.”

Mansonet, the executive director of the Jewish Renaissance Foundation in Perth Amboy, declined an offer to plead guilty to a charge that would have required a sentence of three to five years in prison, Altman, her lawyer, said.

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