Driver Found Guilty of Vehicular Homicide After Texting While Driving

A driver who was texting at the time her car hit another which then struck a pedestrian was found guilty on Friday of vehicular homicide by a New Jersey jury.

The driver, Alexandra Mansonet, had looked down and begun to respond to a text message from her sister-in-law, asking “Cuban, American, or Mexican. Pick one” when she rear-ended a Toyota Corolla which then struck Yuwen Wang, who died several days later. The accident took place on September 28, 2016.

Mansonet testified that she had looked down to turn off the car’s rear-window defogger just before the accident took place.

The jury was asked to apply a 2012 law that places texting while driving on par with a drunken driving.

Forty-seven states and the District of Colombia now ban texting while driving, and 10% of all fatal crashes in the United States in the period from 2013 through 2017 involved distracted driving, according to data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and 14% of those cases involved the use of a mobile phone.  In 2017 alone, at least 401 of the 2,935 distracted-driving traffic-related fatalities were tracked back to the use of a mobile phone while driving.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)