A TikTok Live Stream Turned Fatal

Hang on. I'll be with you in just a minute. Hang on. I'm sure I can still do a great show here today for you and check Facebook and tweets and. No, I can't do that. That would be rude to you and be obnoxious and I wouldn't do a good job. Which brings up our next story here. This is shocking and yet not shocking. It's shocking it doesn't happen more frequently. The Independent reports that a TikTok influencer is now facing serious criminal charges after allegedly killing a pedestrian while live streaming herself driving. Police say Tanisha McCarty Roton, age 43, ran a red light while broadcasting on TikTok, fatally striking Darren Lucas, a 59 year old grocery worker. Investors say the livestream video was preserved and verified through warrants and digital analysis. Okay, I'm frankly surprised this doesn't happen 50 times a day in America and other parts of the world. Here are the facts. The crash occurred November 3rd on the evening commute. So I mentioned the victim, Darren Lucas, was a grocery store worker. It was happening on TikTok. It could have happened on any live streaming platform. Obviously, the charges now include reckless homicide. Good. It is reckless homicide. Anyone who's driving and even staring at their phone is bizarrely reckless. But when you're live streaming and you're trying to keep that audience and get, hey, look at me, look how cool him hit like hit share, blah blah, blah. And then boom, you run over someone and they're dead again. I'm frankly surprised it doesn't happen once an hour in America. Police cite the red light violation on video. It was a Ford Edge suv, although obviously it could happen in any car. I'm not saying there's something uniquely odd about SUV to make them. Make them culpable with anything. According to our government, 3,300 people were killed by distracted driving in 2023. I'm not quite sure how they deduce to get to those statistics. Presumably that. Well, I don't know. Presumably that eliminates those who are just driving drunk. Distraction can be you're fiddling with the knob to turn the radio to another station. If you still use a radio, it could include turning around to beat your kids if they're yelling or screaming in the car. Not that I endorse that, of course, but let's be honest, let's be real with ourselves. The number one source of distraction in a car is the number one source of distraction for everyone, everywhere, every time of the day. And it's this staring at your Phone. And of course live streaming sort of takes it up by a factor of a thousand because you're even more intently focused on do people like me? Are people watching me? How many people are on right now? I'm, I'm hoping that authorities send a strong message with sentencing, but I also think it's time to get creative. I'm not suggesting this person should be treated leniently by getting less prison time, but I do think that some kind of prison sentence forbidding this person from ever having a smartphone again would be wildly, wildly appropriate. I'll leave it to others who figure out the constitutional niceties of how to do that. That's not the scope of our show. But if you've already shown you're so cavalier and so crass as to willingly endanger people's lives by live streaming, I don't know why in the world our society should empower you to do that again. Well, I mean, let's say this person serves a year or two in prison. They get out. Are they going to be live streaming? Hey, look at me. I'm getting away with it again. And maybe they say, okay, I'm not going to live stream anymore. But certainly I can watch a Facebook video. Certainly I can watch filtered with teach. I hope they're not watching my show. If you are driving right now, please turn off my show if you're watching it. You want to listen on a podcast, okay. But please, please don't be watching me or anything or anyone while you're driving. It literally kills again. According to the United States government, it kills more than 3,000 people a year now. I'm glad to see the police in this case, it was the Zion police force using technology and saying they, they've said, quote, the video was preserved and verified through extensive investigation. The son in law of the man killed said, our grieving will last forever. But seeing justice starting to happen helps. And the son also also says he, he leaves behind a wife without her everything. So it's, it's a sad, sad situation and it's entirely preventable. Okay, someone gets pancreatic cancer, that's obviously a sad, sad situation. According to most scientific experts. There's really not that much anybody can do. It's kind of just a bad luck of the draw. But driving over someone while you're live streaming, that is 100% preventable death. It's called put your cell phone away, turn it off, get over the delusion that people can't somehow go five minutes without seeing your face and all. Look, I realize that may be a bit rich coming from me because I do in fact, live stream 24 hours a day, but I don't ever do it if I'm driving. If you see me live streaming at 2 in the morning or 3 in the morning, it's not me actually speaking at that time. It's using technology to push out my video in a linear format. So let's be clear about that. I'm often struck by the fact that when I recently moved from a small urban village that Delray Beach, Florida, to a more suburban area. But where I was for the last four and a half years, until four months ago, was a little village where there were people driving everywhere, walking everywhere. It was a great place, except for the fact that I don't ever remember being at a stop sign or even watching people drive by slowly on Atlantic Avenue, the main drag, without seeing them staring at their phones like this. I mean, it was wildly dangerous. And folks, it's got to stop now. You may or may not buy into the philosophy proposed by Jonathan Haidt that cell phones are essentially destroying our brains and destroying kids and increasing dramatically the rate of especially teenage girls killing themselves, cutting themselves and suffering depression. You may say, well, T.J. that seems to be more correlation than causation. But I think the case is pretty clear that if you're driving, staring at your phone, not looking at the windshield, running over people and killing them, that's correlation and it's causation. And for that reason, it's time to get serious. You know, we mandated the cars have the technology of a seat belt. And it has saved tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives at this point. And I'm old enough to remember when putting on your seatbelt was almost. They didn't use the term back then, but it was almost seen as kind of a woke, politically correct, precious thing, putting on a seatbelt. You know, macho people, real people don't do that. And then it gained acceptance. It grew and grew and grew. And all of a sudden laws were passed requiring it. People do it, laws are passed that automobiles had to have seat belts. And then at some point, it got to the point where if you saw someone, a cab driver, an Uber driver, not with a seatbelt on, it felt weird. It felt like, who is this person? Are they crazy? Are they that foolhardy? The zeitgeist really change. And I think we need to figure out a way of designing a similar zeitgeist change when it comes to cell phones in cars. If you were driving, you could for example, require that Apple and Samsung and other great manufacturers of cell phones somehow put in a device that would simply turn off if it detects the car is in motion. You want to make a call, it's so important, pull off the side of the road and make a phone call. That could happen. I suppose there's a way of putting the onus on car manufacturers to put in some destabilizing signaling process that would make it impossible for your cell phone to send or receive messages. I think the cleaner way would somehow be to put it into cars or excuse me, into phones so that it's automatically destabilized. And then maybe okay, you're on a bus ride or you're in the backseat of a car and you want to use your phone. Maybe there are a number of steps to do that. I mean, let's face it, the folks, the technologists at Apple and Google are so sophisticated, GPS and everything. There's probably a way of determining, okay, if you are actually behind a driving wheel, the driver's wheel in a car, it should be able to detect that and automatically turn off your phone. Oh, but tj, how I listen to my favorite podcast. How will I listen to Filtered with TJ Walker? Guess what? You'll somehow survive. I will survive if you don't listen to or watch the program while you're driving. So again, 3,300 people are dying a year from so called distracted driving. That's more than died in 9 11. When you think of the massive hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars spent in the last quarter century on security measures because of those couple thousand people who died, all the anti terrorism measures, and I'm not saying it wasn't well spent or that wasn't a crisis worthy of changing society, but why is it that 150% of those people can die every year on our roads from something 100% preventable and we're like, eh, I guess it doesn't, Isn't that a shame? Well no, it is a shame, but it's time for our government to act. If we can wildly inconvenience everyone at airports, taking off your shoes, I'm not saying that's a bad idea. But when you think of all of the safety provisions our government imposes on us to prevent the once a generation couple thousand people dying in the World Trade center, why can't we do maybe 2% of that to save the equivalent of a 9, 11 times 1.5 every year on our highways?