{"id":2431,"date":"2023-06-01T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2023-06-01T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2023\/06\/01\/investigative-journalism-public-records-narrative-structure-uber-fatal-crash\/"},"modified":"2024-10-21T15:07:11","modified_gmt":"2024-10-21T15:07:11","slug":"investigative-journalism-public-records-narrative-structure-uber-fatal-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2023\/06\/01\/investigative-journalism-public-records-narrative-structure-uber-fatal-crash\/","title":{"rendered":"Reconstructing a murky maze of blame"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Journalism, by its very nature, focuses on the now \u2014 the events and people making the news today. But powerful stories can be found by mining the past to add fresh material and context to what had once been a sketchy breaking story, abandoned after a few news cycles. Revisiting such a story can pay off with new and unexpected results.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For years, Lauren Smiley<\/a>, who writes about humans in the tech age, had kept track of Rafaela Vasquez. In 2018, Vasquez was at the wheel of an Uber self-driving Volvo when the car struck and killed Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing a darkened road in Tempe, Arizona. She became the world\u2019s first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\"Lauren
Lauren Smiley<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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\u201cI often find my best projects by circling back to news events and chasing the deeper story,\u201d Smiley told me. Her trip back in time produced \u201c\u2018I am the operator\u2019: The aftermath of a self-driving tragedy<\/a>,\u201d a gripping, 10,000-word narrative for Wired magazine published in March 2022.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Smiley displayed remarkable patience as she kept track of the post-crash investigation. Vasquez was charged negligent homicide in connection the crash (the case is scheduled to go to trial<\/a> later this month, but could be further delayed) but had never spoken about it with a journalist. Two years after the accident, Smiley reached out to Vasquez\u2019s defense lawyers, who gave the okay to sit down with their client.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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To prepare, Smiley sent out a flurry of records requests, riding herd on them until agencies delivered. She studied a critical report of a voluminous investigation by federal transportation safety officials. After Uber declined to talk, she used LinkedIn to cold call dozens of past and present employees, many of who spoke on or off the record about the company\u2019s flawed self-driving program. She reached out to Herzberg\u2019s family to learn the impact of the crash on the victim\u2019s mother and daughter.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The story focuses relentlessly, however, on Vasquez, a transgender woman who grew up with a religious, unaccepting father and suffered repeated sexual violence when a judge assigned her to serve a sentence with male inmates for a botched armed robbery attempt with her boyfriend. \u201cI\u2019d never had to have anal stitching before,\u201d Vasquez told Smiley during a seven-hour interview, \u201cbut I had it in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Smiley funneled all of this data into multiple timelines, all annotated for the Wired fact-checker, a backstop that enabled her to reconstruct you-are-there portions of the narrative with limited attribution. Guided by her outlines, she put her inner critic on hold as she began to write. \u201cFirst drafts are about infrastructure, not beauty!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Smiley weaves Vasquez\u2019s story before and after the crash with a granular account, at times down to the hundredth of a second about how the confused computer on board the self-driving car misidentified Herzberg, a shadowy figure jaywalking on the road, and an authoritative look at the now-humbled state of the self-driving movement in the United States. It\u2019s a compelling read, its relentless pace driven by carefully chosen descriptive verbs, a braided structure and elegant writing \u2014 elements that won it a SABEW Best in Business Award for features<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Smiley, a self-described \u201cboots on the ground tech reporter,\u201d is a contributor at Wired. She has written human-centered stories about technology for The Atlantic and New York Magazine. She was an investigative reporter for the \u201cBroken Harts\u201d true crime podcast<\/a> and has worked on staff for Matter and SF Weekly.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In an email interview and annotation with Nieman Storyboard, Smiley discussed her methods for juggling multiple storylines, her education and writing influences and her editors\u2019 essential role. In an annotation of the story, she goes into detail about how how she tracked the story for almost five years, how she gained access to a range of sources, ethical considerations about identifying sources and the story\u2019s structure. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Your bio says you write about humans in the tech age. Why that focus?
<\/strong>I live in the country\u2019s tech capital, but I\u2019m not the reporter who obsesses over gadgets or corporate brinkmanship. I am drawn to the philosophical questions embedded in tech and how tech has put humans in all sorts of weird situations, like driving strangers<\/a> in their own car for a job; or believing a wild rumor on social-media and taking<\/a> startling action; or surveilling the person stealing<\/a> their Amazon boxes off their porch and reporting it on Nextdoor. I really enjoy the luxury of deep interviewing, when you can spend gobs of time understanding someone\u2019s world in hopes of transmitting that to the page. It\u2019s the human messiness that brings me to the game. My great ambition is that the life of the person I write about feels as real and complex as my life does to me.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How did you learn to write narrative nonfiction?
<\/strong>From my days at my high school newspaper and reporting for the University of Iowa college paper, I was always drawn to features, but it took me a while to realize you could apply feature-writing methods to serious material. In college, I started devouring the \u201cBest American Magazine Writing\u201d books compiled by ASME. I re-read Anne Hull\u2019s \u201cDivided Feast<\/a>\u201d 20 times, amazed that she\u2019d unearthed weighty class observations by embedding in a supermarket. Michael Paterniti\u2019s \u201cThe Most Dangerous Beauty\u201d<\/a> made me tearful in admiration as I realized that writing could actually elevate the reporting to a boiling point that it shape-shifts into art.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Throughout college, I honed my skills at feature internships, capped by a summer on the Dallas Morning News features desk, a wonderfully writerly culture circa 2005. (Chip, you should know that my editor, Michael Merschel, had me complete your questionnaire to figure out what a story was really<\/em> about \u2014 an exercise that I still do).  The News sent me to the very first Mayborn conference<\/a>. Listening to nonfiction writers talk about their process all weekend crystallized that I\u2019d found my people and my place.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Before I showed up for my first reporting job at a San Francisco alt-weekly, the editor told me to read Jon Franklin\u2019s \u201cWriting for Story.\u201d<\/a> I\u2019ve carried its lessons with me: how to pick a good tale; how to nod at the piece\u2019s themes via word choices; how to implicitly ask a question in the lede that the piece seeks to answer. I then sprinted through a brutal gantlet of five sink-or-swim years at the alt-weekly, producing a 4,500-word cover feature every five weeks or so. That destroyed any preciousness about the journalistic process. The job acted as my grad school, teaching me how to get records, work with sources, pace a longform feature. The way I can still blaze through a first draft is a callback to that era, though thankfully I usually no longer have to churn them out in a terrifying weekend while chugging Red Bull.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Nina Martin<\/a>, who edited several of my magazine pieces once I went freelance, also imparted the wisdom that you can write about complex people in equally complex situations with both empathy and<\/em> fairness; those two things aren\u2019t mutually exclusive. I find that framing useful for the stories I\u2019m doing these days.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The learning continues, of course. And the crazy thing about journalism is all your heroes put their work for you to study right there, on the page!<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Could you describe your writing process?
<\/strong>One of the most amusing writing scenes I\u2019ve ever watched was in a documentary on the Los Angeles food writer extraordinaire, Jonathan Gold<\/a>. He opens his laptop, types an entire column with dazzling prose, speaking the words in a voice-over as they hit the page, jaunty music playing, then closes his laptop with a satisfied look and walks out. A perfectly linear and publish-ready first draft!<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I wish<\/em>!<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Here\u2019s my way-less-entertaining montage: From all those outlines, I sketch out a short outline, keeping it to a page or two, to map and distill the sections. Then, blast-off! I type out a rough draft as quickly as possible, even when it means the roughest sentences you can imagine. That big messy document frees me of the fear of not having words on the page. There\u2019s no reason to get overly wedded to sentences or a particular transition until you see how the whole story lays out.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Then I copy-paste that beast into a new doc and start refining.  Drafting is the loneliest time; no one can write that first draft but you. Only after many rounds of refining \u2013 each one copy-pasted into a new doc so I know the old one is always there like an old friend should I need it \u2013 do I start getting to that point of lift, when the sentences start to bounce off the page a bit. I try to get it there before I send it to my editor.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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 <\/strong>At one stage, I try to read my draft aloud \u2014 that age-old advice. Clunky phrasings and redundant words leap out; I often shamefully realize I\u2019ve written the same word three times in the same sentence. Also, I do a search-replace for common words in the piece, subbing in synonyms or tweaking the sentence to not even go there. Tighter, more interesting writing always emerges. (I just did that on this very document and deleted 25 uses of \u201cstory,\u201d case in point!)<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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At the bitter end, I get really nit-picky about flow; each sentence should be easy for the eye and mind to sail through, right into the next one. My editors are really good at this verbal Zamboni-driving, too. No way any reader is ever going to give you 45 minutes of their time if reading feels like a chore.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Are there any writers, stories or books that inspire you as you worked on this or other stories? <\/strong>Sometimes I will read a great piece of journalism once I\u2019m into the draft refining process, and it helps jolt me into trying to match that level of mastery. But I also try to apply the adage, \u201cDon\u2019t compare your insides to other people\u2019s outsides.\u201d Published stories have already been through the whole editorial ringer. Be inspired but realistic that your early drafts will not match the sparkle of someone else\u2019s final product.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I was interested in The New Yorker\u2019s feature<\/a> on accidental killers. I was interested in how my mentor Elizabeth Weil wrote<\/a> about a defendant at the center of another fatal tragedy, and in Matthew Power\u2019s profile<\/a> of a drone operator, which had haunted me for years.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What role do your editors play in your work?
<\/strong>I like talking through reporting decisions with my editor, and Wired\u2019s executive editor Maria Streshinsky<\/a> was a generous coach and sounding board over the long reporting road. She also ensured that we were keeping the pedestrian victim top of mind. <\/strong>Later in the revision process, when we were feeling a bit stumped by the structure in the muddled middle, Wired\u2019s feature editor John Gravois<\/a> had the insight of flipping the order of a few of the sections. Everything started flowing better from that point. Once I file a first draft, the editors copilot every editorial decision until the magazine closes.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Annotation:<\/strong>\u00a0Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Smiley\u2019s answers in blue.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A screen grab from a video shows an interior view moments before an Uber SUV hit a woman in Tempe, Ariz., on March 18, 2018. Tempe Police Department via AP, File<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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\u2018I\u2019m the Operator\u2019: The Aftermath of a Self-Driving Tragedy<\/h2>\n

In 2018, an Uber autonomous vehicle fatally struck a pedestrian. In a WIRED exclusive, the human behind the wheel finally speaks<\/h3>\nBy Lauren Smiley
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\nRAFAELA VASQUEZ LIKED<\/strong> to work nights, alone, buffered from a world she had her reasons to distrust. <\/a>This a powerful example of foreshadowing. Why did you include it in the first sentence of the story?<\/span>The headline and lead photo indicate that this piece is about the person you\u2019ve never heard from in this highly publicized crash, but I also wanted to telegraph right away that we\u2019re going to hear Vasquez\u2019s perspective. Of course, this story is concretely about Vasquez getting charged with a crime. But in the feature-writing mental exercise of \u201cWhat is this really, really<\/em> about?\u201d for Vasquez\u2019s personal story, I landed on a theme of seeking acceptance but the reality of being cast out by society throughout her life. I\u2019m surfacing that theme right away in the first sentence. I also want to foreshadow right now that this isn\u2019t going to be just another night on the job.<\/span><\/span>
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\nOne Sunday night in March 2018, Uber<\/a> assigned her the Scottsdale loop. She drove a gray Volvo SUV, rigged up with cameras and lidar sensors through the company\u2019s garage, past the rows of identical cars, past a poster depicting a driver staring down at a cell phone that warned, \u201cIt Can Wait.\u201d <\/a>I\u2019m not familiar with lidar sensors. Did you consider stopping to describe them?<\/span>The lede\u2019s goal is scene-setting and drawing the reader into this tense progression of events. It\u2019s about the image in the reader\u2019s mind of the futuristic car, not technical details. As long as the reader hears \u201cfancy tech car,\u201d I\u2019m content.<\/span><\/span> The clock ticked past 9:15, and Vasquez reached the route\u2019s entry point. She flipped the Volvo into autonomous mode, and the car navigated itself through a blur of suburban Arizona, past auto dealers and Zorba\u2019s Adult Shop and the check-cashing place and McDonald\u2019s. Then it jagged a short stint through Tempe to start the circuit again. It was a route Vasquez had cruised in autonomy some 70 times before.
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\nAs she was finishing her second loop, the Volvo blazed\u00a0<\/strong>across a bridge strung with bistro lights above Tempe Town Lake. <\/a>“Blazed” is the first of many vivid verbs that stud the story. How do you arrive at them \u2014 during drafting or revision or during the reporting?<\/span>Strong verbs make lively writing, but we have to pick an accurate and fair one. She\u2019s not driving the car \u2014 it\u2019s driving itself \u2014 and we know from records that the car was traveling at about 40 mph on a pretty open stretch of road. So I selected \u201cblazed\u201d in my first draft.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Neon signs on glass office buildings were reflected in the water, displaying the area\u2019s tech hub ambitions\u2014Zenefits, Norton LifeLock, Silicon Valley Bank. <\/a>How were you able to name the office buildings, and why do you do so?<\/span>A sense of place is an important part of strong narratives so, while in Tempe reporting, I walked around the crash area, taking photos and videos to remind myself of what I saw when I got back to my desk. I later checked that those companies were there at the time. By selecting these details about tech companies, I\u2019m foreshadowing that Arizona\u2019s emergence as a tech hub is relevant to what is happening. Vasquez is surrounded by evidence of that ambition and the Uber test program she\u2019s part of is also part of that ambition.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Beyond the bridge, the car navigated a soft bend into the shadows under a freeway overpass. At 9:58 pm, it glided to a forlorn stretch of road between a landscaped median and a patch of desert scruff. Four signs in the median warned people not to jaywalk there, directing them to a crosswalk 380 feet away.
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\nThe Uber driving system\u2014which had been in full control of the car for 19 minutes at that point\u2014registered a vehicle ahead that was 5.6 seconds away, but it delivered no alert to Vasquez. Then the computer nixed its initial assessment; it didn\u2019t know what the object was. Then it switched the classification back to a vehicle, then waffled between vehicle and \u201cother.\u201d <\/a>Again you use a descriptive and not typical verb: “waffle.”<\/span>My first draft said \u201cvacillated.\u201d I tweaked to \u201cwaffle\u201d in a revision. Don\u2019t use the ten-cent word if the two-cent one is more effective. The machine is changing its assessment, so \u201cwaffle\u201d was the right choice.<\/span><\/span> At 2.6 seconds from the object, the system identified it as \u201cbicycle.\u201d At 1.5 seconds, it switched back to considering it \u201cother.\u201d Then back to \u201cbicycle\u201d again. The system generated a plan to try to steer around whatever it was, but decided it couldn\u2019t. Then, at 0.2 seconds to impact, the car let out a sound to alert Vasquez that the vehicle was going to slow down. At two-hundredths of a second before impact, traveling at 39 mph, Vasquez grabbed the steering wheel, which wrested the car out of autonomy and into manual mode. It was too late. The smashed bike scraped a 25-foot wake on the pavement. A person lay crumpled in the road. <\/a>How were you able to drill down to reconstruct such a scene down to the hundredths of a second?<\/span>The NTSB public report with all its supporting documents on this crash was an incredible resource. Uber had turned over detailed information to the authorities on what identity the car was assigning the pedestrian in the road, broken down to fractions of a second. While corporate Uber was pretty tightlipped with me, the NTSB report allowed us to be precise throughout.<\/span><\/span>
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\nVasquez did what Uber had taught its employees in the test program to do in case of emergencies: She pulled the vehicle over and called 911. \u201cA bicyclist, um, I, um, hit a bicyclist that was in the road,\u201d she told the dispatcher, her voice tense. \u201cThey shot out in the street \u2026 They are injured, they need help, paramedics.\u201d
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\n\u201cI know it\u2019s pretty scary,\u201d the dispatcher said in soothing tones.
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\nShe told Vasquez to breathe.
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\nWithin six minutes of the crash, cops started to arrive. Paramedics too. One cop scanned a flashlight over the person on the ground. A paramedic kneeled down and pumped the victim\u2019s chest. <\/a>How do you know what the cop and paramedic did when they arrived at the scene?<\/span>I received hours of police body cam footage in a public records request, which showed these early moments at the crash site. Much of this was backed up in the police report as well, confirming the identities of who at the scene was doing what.<\/span><\/span>
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\nDashcam footage from Rafaela Vasquez’s self-driving Uber, pulling out of the garage on the night of the crash.
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\nA couple of minutes later, an officer walked up to the Volvo, where Vasquez sat behind the wheel. He asked if she was OK. \u201cYeah, I\u2019m just shaken up,\u201d Vasquez said. \u201cIs the person OK? Are they badly hurt?\u201d Back by the figure who lay on the ground, a woman began wailing. Vasquez asked the officer, \u201cIs that the person screaming?\u201d He answered: \u201cNo no, that\u2019s probably some people that they know.\u201d
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\nFor the next two hours, Vasquez waited, doing what the police asked. Uber reps arrived. In the early minutes after the crash, one jogged up to Vasquez\u2019s car, and an officer asked him to let the cops talk to her first. Eventually Vasquez moved to sit in a supervisor\u2019s car. She asked for updates about the victim. And she learned that the person with the bicycle had died. <\/a>How did she learn this? Why did you choose to summarize rather than present it as a scene?<\/span>The body cam footage shows Vasquez telling a police officer at one point at the crash scene that she\u2019d been told that the victim had passed away. I didn\u2019t have footage of that moment of Vasquez finding out, or any information about who exactly it was who told her, so I stuck to what I knew.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAfter midnight, Officer Kyle Loehr approached Vasquez and asked if she was the driver in the crash. \u201cI\u2019m the operator,\u201d she said. He asked her to get out of the car, and, body camera running, explained that he was going to run her through some sobriety tests: \u201cThis protects you, protects the city, protects the company,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just literally a box we need to check.\u201d Vasquez tracked Loehr\u2019s green flashlight with her eyes, then his finger, then looked up to the sky and told him when she thought 30 seconds had passed. Sober. <\/a>Why use a one-word sentence fragment here?<\/span>Let\u2019s change up the pace. It\u2019s sharper than saying \u201cThe officer decided she was sober.\u201d Fewer words are usually stronger.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0About 10 minutes later, Loehr came back with more questions. His voice was congenial and chipper. \u201cI\u2019m trying to just lighten the mood a little bit,\u201d he said at one point, \u201cbecause I know it\u2019s stressful, and it\u2019s crappy.\u201d He told her he had to read her Miranda rights to her. That\u2019s what happens, he added, when someone is no longer allowed to leave a scene. Gently, he went on: \u201cLet me walk you through what happens with any of these cases when there\u2019s a fatality.\u201d
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\n\u201cOh God,\u201d Vasquez whispered. \u201cThat word<\/em>.\u201d <\/a>Were these and other exchanges between Vasquez and Officer Loehr drawn from your transcription of the body camera footage?<\/span>Yes, this was from the body cam footage, which I believe was part of the full police report that I requested through the Tempe police department.<\/span><\/span>
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\nMultiple blunt-force injuries. That\u2019s what the medical examiner would put down as Elaine Herzberg\u2019s cause of death. Manner of death: accident. Herzberg had lived in Arizona her whole life and had resorted to camping in the streets near Tempe. The 49-year-old often carried a radio playing the local rock station; she collected frog mementos and colored to relax. She had struggled with addiction. That March night, she became the first pedestrian killed by a self-driving car. <\/a>How did you verify this fact?<\/span>This feature was published four years after the fatality, which was widely reported as the first of its kind in the young self-driving industry, so we (me, the editors, the fact checkers) were comfortable with stating this plainly without a qualifier word of the \u201cfirst-known,\u201d or some such.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Why did you choose this scene to open the story?<\/span>My first draft also started at the crash scene but a different entry point, a moment after the crash, and then talked a bit more about Vasquez in the second graf. My editor Maria Streshinsky urged me to stay in chronology\u2014 to start with the lead up to the crash while sticking close to Vasquez\u2019s perspective. It\u2019s more elegant for the scene to spool out chronologically, less jostling for the reader.<\/span><\/span>
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\nHerzberg\u2019s death is the kind of tragedy the autonomous driving industry claims it can prevent. In the US, car accidents kill more than 38,000 people a year, more than 90 percent of them at least in part due to human error. By taking sleepiness, inattention, drunkenness, and rage out of the equation and replacing them with vigilant, precise technology, self-driving cars promise<\/a> to make the roads dramatically safer. But to reach that purported future, we must first weather the era we\u2019re in now: when tech is a student driver. <\/a>Terrific analogy. When did you come up with it?<\/span>My editor John Gravois came up with the student-driver concept in our many iterations of the nut graf, which is one of the very last parts of the story that locked into place. I was deep in the frenzied march to publication, and sometimes it takes an editor who still has that big-picture view to surgically cut through the haze with the perfect phrase.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>That means gangly fleets of sensor-bedecked cars sucking in data on millions of miles of public roads, learning to react to our flawed and improvisational ways. And inevitably, as experts have always warned, that means crashes.
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\nQuestions of fault when things go wrong have been settled over a century for human driving. But they are still largely the stuff of thought experiments for the cyborgs now roving our streets: vehicles controlled by a machine brain, programmed by human engineers, and usually overseen on the road by some other person behind the wheel. <\/a>This is an ideal example of the power of three<\/a>.<\/span>I didn\u2019t consciously think about the power of three! I wanted to get the unsettled question of fault in a self-driving crash high up, which was the philosophical dilemma that drew me to this subject. Also to explain that this isn\u2019t really a matter of man vs. machine; the machine is doing what humans programmed it to do, and those corporate and engineering decisions are also going to be a big issue.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>For years, researchers and self-driving advocates had anxiously prognosticated<\/a> about how the public and the legal system would react to the first pedestrian death caused by a self-driving car. <\/a>How do you decide when to insert a hot link in your narrative?<\/span>The edit team decides what links to add, and they space them out throughout the piece with the hope of adding context and backup for certain facts and at certain moments.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe crash in Tempe ripped those musings into reality\u2014forcing police, prosecutors, Uber, and Vasquez into roles both unwanted and unprecedented in a matter of seconds. At the scene that night, Vasquez stood at the center of a tragedy and a conundrum. She couldn\u2019t yet fathom the part she was about to play in sorting out where the duties of companies and states and engineers end, and the mandate of the person inside the car begins. <\/a>Do you consider the previous three grafs what you consider the nut graf of this story?<\/span>Yes!<\/span><\/span><\/a>Why did you decide to step back from the narrative of the crash to put it in context here?<\/span>I first learned in Franklin\u2019s \u201cWriting for Story\u201d that the lede asks a question, either literally or implied, that then pushes the reader to keep going in order to find the answer. So this nut graf is widening out the stakes, showing those bigger questions for us as a society, as well as the specific question of what will happen to Vasquez.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Were those passages a challenge to write?<\/span>A strange phenomenon is how when I go back and read a published piece, the sentences and structure have the air of inevitability, when, in truth, these decisions were only arrived at through an arduous creative process. We really labored on the nut graf for this complicated, multifaceted story, a story that still has no conclusion, since this criminal case is still pending. The exact language only locked into focus in late revisions.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u201cI\u2019m sick over what happened,\u201d Vasquez confided to the police as her mind spun in the hours after the crash. She said she felt awful for the victim\u2019s family. She also grieved the event in a different way\u2014as a loyal foot soldier of the self-driving revolution. \u201cOh God, this is going to be a setback for the whole industry,\u201d Vasquez told Loehr. \u201cWhich is not what I want.\u201d
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\nAt the time, Vasquez was an Uber defender<\/em>. She had come a long way to this job. Over the previous few years, she\u2019d acquired a dizzying track record of doing hidden work for highly visible companies\u2014moderating grisly<\/a> posts on Facebook, she says; tweeting about Dancing With the Stars<\/em> from ABC\u2019s Twitter; policing social media for Wingstop and Walmart. But her position with Uber\u2019s Advanced Technologies Group had offered new stability, and after years of turmoil as a transgender woman navigating a hostile society, she was careful not to jeopardize it. <\/a>Did you intend for this sentence fulfill the promise of the lede\u2019s foreshadowing?<\/span>We\u2019re giving a bit more detail about the \u201cdistrust\u201d we were talking about in the first sentence, parsing out enough information to start to feel we\u2019re getting to know Vasquez. But even this is still summarizing and foreshadowing: we\u2019re going to get more into the detail later.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Vasquez had even removed the box braids of colorful yarn that had defined her look since she was young. At a new job, she had come to think, \u201cthe less attention I bring to myself, the better.\u201d During her nine months of work as an operator, the viselike grip of everything she\u2019d endured as a child and teen and adult had slackened just a bit. As she trudged into her forties, Vasquez had felt her life, finally, relaxing into a kind of equilibrium. <\/a>How do you know this?<\/span>Vasquez said this in our interview.<\/span><\/span>
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\nNow, as she and Loehr sat in a victim services van near the Tempe bridge after midnight, grappling with Herzberg\u2019s death, the vise was tightening again. She found herself asking, \u201cDo I need a lawyer?\u201d <\/a>How did you get on to this story in the first place?<\/span>There was this widely viewed video in the seconds leading to the crash, so many people had seen Rafaela Vasquez\u2019s anguished face in that moment. But she hadn\u2019t given any interviews, so little was really known about her. With some Googling, I was able to find out that Vasquez had worked tech-related jobs for years, in tech support and customer service. At one point she had even been featured on a blog as an avid beta tester, talking about how she loved tech. It\u2019s always a good sign when an idea gets more interesting as you learn more. I was also intrigued, philosophically and legally, in the question of fault when both humans and self-driving tech (itself designed by people, don\u2019t forget) play a role in a car crash. The fact that only one person was being held criminally responsible, and yet the terrain here was so complex, also seemed ripe for further digging.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Did you have a goal when you set out and worked on the piece?<\/span>I wanted people to understand Vasquez, and what she was at the center of \u2014 that this crash isn\u2019t just about her. I also wanted to tie together the many complicated threads swirling around this tragedy in a readable way and unearth public records that might add to the public knowledge of this case.<\/span><\/span>
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\nARIZONA WELCOMED UBER\u2019S<\/strong> self-driving program to Tempe with feisty, high-profile panache, after a long courtship. Business-\u00adboosting governor Doug Ducey, the former CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, took office in 2015, promising to yank the state out of its post-\u00adrecession doldrums. He wanted to lure Silicon Valley companies over the Arizona border, pitching his state as the anti-California with trollish flamboyance. He axed restrictions on Theranos blood testing, welcomed an Apple data center, ended local bans on Airbnb, and pressured officials to let Ubers and Lyfts roll up to Phoenix\u2019s largest airport. <\/a>Once again you back off the narrative to present context. How did you arrive at the story\u2019s architecture?<\/span>It would have been valid for this section to continue with the early hours and days of the investigation to keep the plot rolling. I sometimes think some longform stories cut to background a bit too early before the reader has gotten totally invested. But in this story, I wanted to start showing the greater landscape this crash happened upon early, so we cut back in time here and then start working our way back to the crash chronologically.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAlong the way, Ducey\u2019s office and Uber entered a mutual embrace. At one point, a Ducey staffer emailed Uber and referred to a 2015 Arizona law that regulated ride-sharing as \u201cyour bill.\u201d At times, Uber suggested tweets for the governor\u2019s office account and talking points for press events. <\/a>How were you able to describe Ducey\u2019s courtship of Uber in such detail?<\/span>I did a public records request for the emails. I try to always brainstorm what public records exist about my story topic, even on pure features. Records have brought me so many incredible details over the years, things I wouldn\u2019t have learned by other means.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0In June 2015, Uber opened a customer service center and pledged to hire 300 Arizonans. And in August, Ducey signed an exuberant executive order allowing companies to test self-driving vehicles on public roads.
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\nAll of that was good for Uber. At the time, its CEO, Travis Kalanick, saw the development of robotaxis as an existential battle, particularly with Google. The company had to at least<\/em> tie for first place in the autonomy race, or else, he said in an interview<\/a>, \u201cUber is no longer a thing.\u201d <\/a>Why did you rely on Business Insider for this quote?<\/span>They did the seminal interview with Kalanick at that critical juncture, in which he stated this existential fear. Self-driving car companies were making a lot of claims in the press in those days, adding to the fervor.<\/span><\/span> Human drivers could never compete on cost. But by the beginning of 2015, Kalanick\u2019s company was way behind. So Uber poached 40 experts from Carnegie Mellon\u2019s robotics department to create something called the Uber Advanced Technologies Group and tasked it with turning the company into a self-driving force. Uber shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars into the self-driving unit, which would, over the next three years, grow to more than 1,000 employees across five cities. <\/a>Your story is written with compelling authority. Some of what you present, such as most of the opening scene, is not attributed or the attribution is delayed. Why did you choose this narrative approach, rather than including information about your reporting or sources, either in the story or a footnote or sidebar, as some narratives packages do? And how did you decide what to attribute directly?<\/span>Wired has an extensive fact-checking process. I annotate nearly every factual assertion with its source, which the fact-checker is then going to vet. For a piece this size, the process takes weeks. That rigor, the promise that the words here have been fully scrutinized, is part of the magazine\u2019s covenant with the reader. We tend to sprinkle attributions in gingerly. Still, I\u2019m a fan of the sidebar approach that many publications are doing these days on \u201chow we got this story,\u201d instead of gumming up the reading experience with tons of attribution.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIn 2016, with Google\u2019s Waymo and GM\u2019s Cruise already piloting prototype self-driving cars around the Phoenix area, Ducey spotted yet another way to remake his state as the nation\u2019s self-driving test capital. That December, California revoked the registrations on Uber\u2019s test cars after the company refused to get a testing permit. Within hours Ducey tweeted, \u201cCalifornia may not want you; but AZ does!\u201d The next day, Uber\u2019s Volvos were loaded onto semitrailers bound for Arizona. At the time, federal regulators were standing back, suggesting that companies voluntarily report their safety practices, and recommending states do the same.
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\nIn a secretive industry, miles driven in autonomous mode were a key signal of a program\u2019s vitality. So throughout 2017, as Arizona became the largest site for Uber\u2019s testing, employees recall company leaders demanding that the operators \u201ccrush miles\u201d\u2014hundreds of thousands, then millions, of them. \u201cThese were pretty purposely outrageous goals,\u201d says Jonathan Barentine, a former employee who trained the human backup operators. \u201cWe were trying to ramp up really quickly, which at the time was what Uber was good at\u2014or able to do.\u201d <\/a>How did you find Barentine, who proves to be such an important source, and get him to talk to you on the record?<\/span>I\u2019m not a beat reporter with a long list of existing sources, so I cold-contacted dozens of former Uber ATG employees, finding most of them on LinkedIn.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0By late 2017, Uber boasted that it was racking up 84,000 miles a week.
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\nSoon Uber was running 40 cars across thousands of Arizona miles on up to eight shifts a day, with human pilots rescuing the fledgling robots when they went awry, and regulators barely watching. When Arizona welcomed Uber\u2019s audacious program, Bryant Walker Smith, a leading scholar of self-driving policy, told the San Jose Mercury News<\/em> that Ducey would symbolically \u201cown\u201d the company\u2019s self-driving future\u2014whether that be success or a high-profile crash. In California, Smith had recommended to the state\u2019s officials that they revoke Uber\u2019s registration; as for\u00a0 Arizona\u2019s quick embrace of the same program, he warned, \u201cThere are risks to that level of permissiveness.\u201d <\/a>Would you describe the research that undergirds your story?<\/span>Extensive consumption of past news coverage, gathering court records and police reports, poring over the NTSB report on this crash, filing public records requests (both to learn new information and corroborate facts I got elsewhere), interviews with ex-Uber employees and self-driving experts and reaching out to many others close to this case who declined comment. In a long reporting process like this one, where your knowledge builds so much over time, I find it important to re-read documents at different junctures; there\u2019s always some detail that will take on new meaning as you learn more.<\/span><\/span><\/a>How long did it take to complete the research, reporting, drafting and revision?<\/span>Once the attorneys agreed, it was time to start on the vast amount of research it was going to take to put an interview into context.\u00a0 I sent out a bevy of records requests and pestered many of those agencies throughout 2021 to fulfill them.\u00a0 I also read everything I could find about the crash and Uber\u2019s testing program. I\u2019m copy-pasting everything that seems important into a timeline \u2014 the primary tool I use on nearly every story, especially ones about criminal cases, where chronology is especially important. Even if all those events don\u2019t make the cut, I need that backbone to know the contours; I need it when outlining and writing and later annotating the piece for the fact-checker. (I always include the original source for each entry so I can find it again.) I spoke with Vasquez in August 2021, and I started writing that fall while continuing to report, including cold-contacting dozens of former Uber employees. The editors spent time with the drafts, giving me the ability to step away from the piece and return with a little bit of distance from my words. Then I plunged in again that fall and winter. The piece published in March 2022 \u2014 so about a year and a half after I first learned I\u2019d be able to speak with Vasquez.<\/span><\/span>
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\nOVER THE COURSE<\/strong> of 2017, the Advanced Technologies Group brought on hundreds of test operators in Arizona. <\/a>You weave multiple timelines: the crash, Vasquez\u2019s life before and after her Uber career, the rise and fall of the self-driving industry, among others. How did you keep track of them?<\/span>My master timeline was crucial \u2014 and was color-coded by what storyline each nugget pertained to.<\/span><\/span> \u00a0<\/strong>Jonathan Barentine, a friendly and precocious program manager who was just a few years out of studying liberal arts at Cornell, was posted in Tempe to oversee training for the new recruits. He remembers that Vasquez, hired that summer, took the training so seriously she appeared stressed. \u201cIt seemed like a bit of a big break for her,\u201d he says. \u201cShe really cared about making sure that she could do her job.\u201d
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\nFor many of the new operators, coming off work on cleaning crews or as delivery drivers or regular Uber drivers, walking into the Advanced Technologies Group\u2019s Tempe headquarters was like entering a Silicon Valley Shangri-la. The facility came with an alluring nickname\u2014Ghost Town\u2014from its days when few employees reported to the sprawling office-park building. The name had stuck even as exploding ranks of workers dropped in for car assignments, free catered meals, and a break room packed with Red Bull and snacks. The operators earned full benefits and about $20 to $24 an hour\u2014solidly middle-class wages in the area. Vasquez\u2019s coworkers were buying houses and booking vacations. Workers marveled at the latitude and trust of the company\u2019s culture: Everyone gave feedback at regular debriefs, and managers let workers take breaks as needed to stay sharp on the road. Some stayed after hours to play video games. <\/a>What was the reporting you did that made it possible to describe Ghost Town\u2019s culture with such specificity?<\/span>Other staffers I reached out to filled me in with precise details about their jobs and workplace. Remember that not every source has to tell you every detail: I didn\u2019t need to learn what Ghost Town looked like from Vasquez when there were hundreds of other people who worked there.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>And they worked at the vanguard of tech. Flavio Beltran, an operator in the Tempe program, says, \u201cI felt like, wow, I\u2019m a part of history. I felt a very huge sense of pride.\u201d <\/a>How did you find Beltran?<\/span>Beltran was one of the few who had appeared in some news reports about this crash. ContactOut is a web extension that will surface emails from LinkedIn.<\/span><\/span>
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\nVasquez, for her part, was fairly subdued. She says the mix of solitary work with a few interactions suited her. While she started to count a couple of colleagues as friends, she primarily seemed engaged with the work. A supervisor says Vasquez would walk up to her manager\u2019s desk to report a new tidbit about the cars or make suggestions. She got a bonus for her performance in late 2017.
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\nIn the first months of testing on the roads, two people would work together in the car. Ideally, the person in the left seat\u2014the driver\u2019s side\u2014called out things like obstacles and traffic signs: Do we see the bicyclist ahead? The pedestrian on the left? This stop sign?<\/em> The person in the right seat would confirm on a laptop whether the system detected it: Check. Check. Check.<\/em> If there was a hiccup, the person in the driver\u2019s seat could take control of the car. The other person would write up the issue for the company to review.
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\nIn the fall of 2017, just a few months after Kalanick was ousted as CEO, Uber announced that it was changing the plan. Now there\u2019d be just one operator in each car. Some heard this was because the tech was getting better. But with the self-driving unit chewing through hundreds of millions of dollars a year, others at the Advanced Technologies Group heard Uber wanted to stretch labor costs across more miles. (Uber says cost was not a factor in its decision.) <\/a>How did you get the company\u2019s point of view?<\/span>I contacted former Uber executives, none of whom got back to me. So we approached Uber with a list of factchecking questions to respond to.<\/span><\/span>
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\nBarentine lurched to retrain the workers to manage the cars alone. Typically, he says, a solo driver would be used only to test more mature versions of the software, in part to minimize the number of times the human had to take over from the vehicle. Now feedback on the vehicle\u2019s performance en route was to be entered via some buttons on a tablet mounted on the dashboard. A few operators told me they had to get used to handling the car alone, for hours, with no conversation mate to spice up the repetitive loops. <\/a>Why did you introduce yourself into the narrative here?<\/span>It was the simplest way to say that we got this information from interviews. The attribution question in an ongoing balancing act.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Combined with the sheer number of miles they were racking up, the change also worried Barentine. \u201cAll my colleagues in learning development were very uneasy,\u201d he says.
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\nWithout a second set of eyes in the car for long stretches in autonomous mode, the workers also found it harder to resist the forbidden lure of using their phones.
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\nOn the very first day that he was in the car alone, Adam Caplinger, an operator in Pittsburgh, where Uber was also testing self-driving vehicles, snapped a photo at a red light. He self-\u00adreported the transgression. Managers later showed him video from the car\u2019s dashcam. As the car kept driving, he\u2019d continued typing on his phone, a moment that Caplinger hadn\u2019t even remembered. \u201cI felt sick in my stomach,\u201d he says. \u201cMy eyes did go to my phone a lot more than I realized.\u201d Management told him they had to set an example and fired him. <\/a>Another great source. How did you track him down in Pittsburgh?<\/span>Same thing: LinkedIn and a cold email. I had no idea Caplinger had this very relevant experience when I contacted him. This is the benefit of casting a large net. I talked to anyone who would reply.<\/span><\/span>
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\nEven the guy who designed that \u201cIt Can Wait\u201d poster\u2014the one that hung around Ghost Town reminding operators not to pick up their phones\u2014ran afoul of the rule. In early 2018, after he\u2019d logged thousands of autonomous miles, Flavio Beltran spotted a plane\u2019s contrail\u2014and snapped a photo, just as an operator in another car passed, looking at him. \u201cI was like, \u2018Aw man, fuck,\u2019\u201d Beltran says. <\/a>Increasingly, mainstream publications, such as The New York Times, are printing profanities more frequently than in the past. What is Wired\u2019s style?<\/span>Wired is fine with swear words within reason, and if they aren\u2019t frivolous. Here, the swearing is human and relatable; it gets across the emotion and the important fact that other operators were making distracted mistakes on the road after the company took out the second driver.<\/span><\/span>
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\nManagement urged operators to report coworkers who broke the rules. (\u201cNinety-nine percent of the team wanted the program to continue and were trying to preserve it,\u201d a supervisor says.) <\/a>Why didn\u2019t you name this person or say why you didn\u2019t?<\/span>He requested anonymity, as did many staffers because of the company\u2019s nondisclosure agreements, and staffers\u2019 need to preserve their careers. So again, with the editors, I talked through the balancing act of how much we need to pierce the fourth wall and explain our decisions to readers for what\u2019s a quick quote here.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Tempe managers also did occasional retroactive spot checks, pulling the dashcam footage of randomly selected vehicles. But with busy schedules and the dramatic ramp-up of miles, the checks were infrequent. <\/a>You present an insider\u2019s view of Uber\u2019s self-driving policies. How did you gain this knowledge?<\/span>Information about the infrequency of spot checks was in the NTSB report, and ex-staffers also told me this in interviews.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>(Also, Barentine says, it seemed like Tempe management\u2019s regular checks, ride-alongs, and improvement plans for low performers fell away.) Vasquez\u2019s supervisor later told investigators that he never reviewed videos of her on the job. <\/a>Where did you locate the statement of Vasquez\u2019s supervisor?<\/span>The NTSB interviewed her supervisor and printed in their report. The report was extensive and a valuable reporting tool.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>The company didn\u2019t check drivers in real time either, another supervisor says: \u201cWe didn\u2019t want the operators thinking that we were just spying on them while they are trying to work.\u201d Mostly, he added, they trusted the operators to police themselves.
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\nBut whoever does the policing, whether a supervisor or an operator, faces a Sisyphean battle against a well-documented phenomenon: something called automation complacency. When you automate any part of a task, the human overseer starts to trust that the machine has it handled and stops paying attention. Numerous industries have struggled to find ways to keep workers attentive in the face of this fact. In 2013, Google started its own self-driving pilot program, using employees to test cars on their commute. Told to watch the road and be ready to take over in case of emergency, the Googlers instead typed on their phones, curled their eyelashes, and slept while hurtling down the highway. Google ended the experiment in a matter of weeks, deciding that it must take humans completely out of the loop\u2014only full automation would do. More recently, Tesla drivers using their vehicle\u2019s Auto\u00adpilot feature have been spotted sleeping while riding on highways and have been involved in a number of fatal crashes, including one in which a California driver had a strategy game active on his phone. <\/a>Horrifying stuff. How were you able to document these instances automation complacency?<\/span>Google has spoken about this failed experiment publicly. Tesla\u2019s crashes have been widely reported and scrutinized and videos of Tesla drivers sleeping are all over social media and have gotten a lot of press attention.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u201cIt finally happened,\u201d a coworker texted grimly. \u201cWe finally killed someone.\u201d
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\nAt Uber, operators say that staying focused on the job was easier in the early, \u201cwild bronco\u201d days, as one Pittsburgh worker put it, when the cars\u2019 antics were frequent and dramatic. But with only one person in the car, and the machines getting better at navigating, it was easier to zone out. Between April 2017 and February 2018, according to records Uber later gave investigators, the company caught 18 operators breaking the phone policy. Uber gave nine of them additional training and fired the other nine, including Beltran.<\/a>How did you obtain these records? <\/span>The NTSB report was such a help; Uber cooperated with the investigation and so this information was included in the report, which was a reporting trove.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u201cI understood why. That was our one major rule,\u201d Beltran says. \u201cI was devastated. It was one of the best jobs I ever had.\u201d But both he and Caplinger told me their slipups were in part due to company policy: They would never have shot the darn pictures, they say, had a second person still been in the car.
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\nOn March 13, 2018\u2014five days before the crash\u2014Robbie Miller, an operations manager at Uber\u2019s self-driving-truck division, sent an email to company executives and lawyers. In the message, later published by The Information, Miller complained that some drivers in the car division seemed poorly trained, damaging cars nearly every other day in February. He urged the company to put a second operator back in each car. He also wrote that cutting the fleet size dramatically \u201cwould significantly reduce ATG\u2019s likelihood of being involved in an accident.\u201d
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\nFive days after Miller hit send, Vasquez pulled out of the Ghost Town garage to travel the Scotts\u00addale loop for her 72nd and 73rd\u2014and final\u2014time.
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\nIn her 39 minutes on the road that night, the car asked her to take over just once, for a few seconds.
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\nOne former Uber employee from Pittsburgh\u2014who worked as a triage analyst, looking over incidents operators had flagged on the road\u2014says he was baffled by the sheer number of loops the company racked up in its \u201ccrush miles\u201d era. When the crash happened, he says, a friend from work grimly texted him. He recalls it reading, \u201cIt finally happened. We finally killed someone.\u201d <\/a>Why didn\u2019t you identify the employee by name?<\/span>The source requested anonymity, and we knew that was the only way to have this piece of information considering the company’s nondisclosure requirements, so we agreed to it.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u201cI CAN\u2019T GIVE<\/strong> legal advice,\u201d Officer Loehr told Vasquez, sitting in the victim services van after she asked whether she might need a lawyer. Authorities would reconstruct the crash, he explained, and that would determine if Vasquez had been at all negligent. \u201cThere\u2019s a hypothetical possibility that it could go criminal,\u201d he told her. \u201cI don\u2019t foresee it going that way.\u201d
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\nEven after Vasquez had listened to Loehr clip through her Miranda rights, heard him say that anything she said could be used against her in court, she kept talking: about her job and how the car had been working fine, about how she only saw Herzberg \u201cright at impact.\u201d She spoke as if she was comforted that someone was being kind and wanted to listen. He urged her to call a crisis response number for mental health services. \u201cDon\u2019t beat yourself up about it. What you went through is the definition<\/em> of trauma.\u201d As he wrapped up the interview, Loehr said, \u201cYou should breathe. You\u2019re OK. Collisions happen.\u201d <\/a>You segue nicely into this scene in the van. Was it taken from body camera footage as well?<\/span>The chronology, which left the crash scene after the lede section and went back in time, has now made its way back to the crash. So now we\u2019re plunging into post-crash events. These quotes and scene details are from the officer\u2019s body cam. Nothing helps more than video in reconstructing a scene.<\/span><\/span>
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\nBut the Tempe cops knew this wasn\u2019t just another collision. And so did Uber: Immediately after the accident, the company grounded its self-driving car fleet across all its testing sites.
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\n\u201cYou know as well as I know, this is going to be an international story,\u201d an officer told a huddle of Uber reps at the scene. The police body cams were running, he said, and everything would be done \u201cout in the open.\u201d The car and all its recordings were now evidence; any attempt to alter them, he warned, would be a crime. On a more collegial note, the officer added that he needed Uber to be a partner in sleuthing. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be working together throughout this whole process from now, probably for months.\u201d
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\nIn the early morning hours, Vasquez retreated to Uber headquarters to calm down, and eventually drove home. The Volvo was towed to a police facility, and the cops nabbed warrants for the car\u2019s data. Before dawn, they had taken custody of the SanDisk memory card from the camera mounted below the rearview mirror\u2014the one that recorded both the car\u2019s human pilot and a view of the road ahead. <\/a>Why was it important to use the brand of the memory card?<\/span>This adds a nice bit of verisimilitude to the scene and a more specific mental image for readers. Wired has a pretty tech savvy audience, so we knew it would conjure a clear image for many.<\/span><\/span>
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\nUber employees helped the cops find the right footage, which would go on to play a key role in the investigation: video of Vasquez in the driver\u2019s seat as the car navigated the route; then of Vasquez gazing down toward her right knee, toward the lower console. Her glances downward averaged 2.56 seconds, but on one early loop, on the same stretch of road where the crash would take place, she looked down for more than 26 seconds. At times, the investigators thought she seemed to smirk. <\/a>How do you know this?<\/span>The duration of her gazes and her facial expressions were in the police and NTSB reports.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0In the seconds before the car hit Herzberg, Vasquez looked down for about five seconds. Just before impact, she looked up, and gasped.
\n
\nThe media descended on the story the next day. Right away, experts were quoted lambasting Arizona\u2019s lax regulatory environment, calling for a national moratorium on testing, and saying that fatalities are inevitable when developing such a technology.
\n
\nInitially, Vasquez says, she was reassured by the police\u2019s public stance. Tempe\u2019s then police chief, Sylvia Moir, told the San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>, \u201cIt\u2019s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway.\u201d Uber, she said, \u201cwould likely not be at fault,\u201d though she wouldn\u2019t rule out charges for the human pilot.
\n
\nAfter that interview, Moir told me, emails that pulsed with \u201cexcruciating rage\u201d deluged her inbox, accusing Moir of complicity in Tempe\u2019s self-driving experiments and of blaming Herzberg for her own death. <\/a>Another great verb choice, active and vivid.<\/span>The verb fits the information at hand; you associate \u201cpulsing\u201d with adrenaline, with vitriol, with emotion.<\/span><\/span> People were angry and wanted accountability. As the hours ticked by, reporters started digging up as many details as they could about Vasquez\u2014including information about an 18-year-old felony for which she had served just under four years in prison.
\n
\nBy the end of the day, a search warrant had been issued for any cell phone Vasquez had with her in the Volvo \u201cto determine if Rafaela was distracted.\u201d Maybe that would show what she was so interested in down by her knee. The warrant also listed the crime now under investigation: vehicular manslaughter.
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\n
\nTWO NIGHTS AFTER<\/strong> the crash, a trio of police gathered outside room 227 at a Motel 6 in Tucson. Vasquez had checked in because, she says, reporters were thronging her apartment. The first days had set her reeling. \u201cI knew everything happened; I just couldn\u2019t believe it was happening. I was in shock.\u201d Now as she greeted the cops, she seemed calm but slightly on edge; her attorney didn\u2019t want her answering any questions, she told them. <\/a>Who provided the description of Vasquez\u2019s demeanor?<\/span>It\u2019s my description of how Vasquez was acting, based on viewing the body cam footage. I chose \u201cseemed\u201d because I cannot tell you that\u2019s how she felt; only that she appears that way. My fact-checker agreed with this description, too \u2014 it\u2019s important to vet your perception with another sounding board, to make sure other reasonable people agree.<\/span><\/span> They were there to bag her phones into evidence. She initially told the officers that she\u2019d only had her work phone with her in the car during the crash, but eventually handed over two LG phones\u2014the one she used for work, with a black case, she explained to them, and her personal one, in a metallic case.
\n
\nThe next morning, the data that police extracted showed no calls made or texts sent in the minutes before the accident. Then, according to police reports, the cops homed in on the apps. Were videos playing at the time of the crash?<\/em> <\/a>Here you directly attribute the sources. Why?<\/span>That fine line again. Given the police, other than the former chief, declined to speak with me about this open case, I wanted to say how we know about the sequence of police actions. I try to do it quickly and minimally.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Search warrants went to Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.
\n
\nMaybe cell phone data would show what Vasquez was gazing at down by her knee.
\n
\nThe Tempe police were also weighing whether to make public the Volvo\u2019s dashcam footage of the moments leading up to the crash. The Maricopa County attorney, Bill Montgomery, told them<\/a> that releasing the video, which was in police custody at that point, could jeopardize their suspect\u2019s right to fair legal proceedings. But Moir says the police were under \u201cconsiderable\u201d pressure from the public to do so, and they wanted to show there was nothing to hide; so the police tweeted the footage. Suddenly the world could see both Vasquez and Herzberg in the seconds before impact. Joe Guy, one operator in Tempe, gathered with others who\u2019d come into Ghost Town, and they watched the video of Vasquez. \u201cMost of us,\u201d he says, \u201cwe went, \u2018What the fuck was she looking at?\u2019\u201d
\n
\nAs the investigation ramped up, half a dozen Advanced Technologies Group personnel from other offices arrived in Tempe. At the police garage, cops stood by while the company downloaded the impounded car\u2019s data so it could analyze what the system had done that night.
\n
\nThree days after the crash, the visiting Uber leadership gathered at Ghost Town with Tempe police and federal investigators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board\u2014the premier federal investigatory body for crashes. Because the software was proprietary, former NTSB chair Robert Sumwalt explained to me, everyone needed Uber to share its findings.
\n
\nAccording to a police report of the meeting, Uber reps explained to the group that the company had overridden Volvo\u2019s built-in automatic braking feature. Uber would later tell investigators this was because it interfered with the company\u2019s own systems. The reps also presented their preliminary findings: While Uber\u2019s own driving system recognized Herzberg, it didn\u2019t do anything to avoid hitting her. That was Vasquez\u2019s job, they said. She hadn\u2019t taken the car out of autonomy until just before the moment of impact.
\n
\nVasquez wasn\u2019t there to hear Uber\u2019s assertion, but pretty quickly, she says, her supervisors\u2019 interactions with her went from consoling to unnerving. One day, Vasquez says, she was told not to show up for the company\u2019s movie night. \u201cThat\u2019s when I really started getting nervous,\u201d she says. Vasquez had asked her employer to pay for a criminal defense attorney, and Uber had agreed. Now her contact with fellow employees and work friends came to a halt.
\n
\nAdding to the uncertainty, a week after the accident, Governor Ducey wrote to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi with a newly stern tone: \u201cMy top priority is public safety,\u201d he said. He found the dashcam footage \u201cto be disturbing and alarming.\u201d He was, he wrote, suspending Uber\u2019s ability to test its cars in the state. <\/a>You amassed an impressive mountain of information from your research and reporting. What techniques did you use to boil it down, deciding what to leave in and what to cut?<\/span>There were several storylines I wanted to follow: The self-driving industry\u2019s race to be first to get a self-driving car on the road; Uber\u2019s fervid part in that race; the regulatory and political story; the investigation by the police and the NTSB; the crash victim, Elaine Herzberg\u2019s story and Vasquez\u2019s story. My master timeline helped me see how it all fit together. I color-coded the entries according to which thread it spoke to, then I filtered that 110-page document into an outline. I think the Uber sources got a separate outline, and Vasquez also got her own outline so I could organize all her quotes thematically and chronologically. The final tweaking on what stays and goes happens in revisions and edits. One key call was a big cut to ensure all the details about Uber were relevant to this<\/em> case. We weren\u2019t writing a comprehensive report on every last issue at the company, and a lot of that had already been explored. My reporting was strong in the Uber employee experience, especially that of the other test operators, so I leaned into their perspective on their jobs.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nTEN DAYS AFTER<\/strong> the accident, Uber agreed to pay out a settlement for Elaine Herz\u00adberg\u2019s husband and her daughter Christine Wood, who says it was in the low millions. Wood too had no home and had been camping near the crash site.
\n
\nWood says that Herzberg, who\u2019d served stints in county jail on drug charges, had tried to shield her children from her struggles with controlled substances. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t proud of it, and she did what she could to make sure me and my brother stayed away from it,\u201d Wood says. She says she and her mom had often jaywalked where the accident happened, sometimes to charge their phones at an electrical plug in the median. (The city has since filled in the median\u2019s footpaths and added more no-crossing signs to the area.) When she died, Herzberg had methamphetamine in her blood.
\n
\nSigns near the crash site warn people not to jaywalk, directing them to a crosswalk 380 feet away.
\n
\nWith the settlement money, Wood and Herz\u00adberg\u2019s husband bought a ranch house in Mesa. \u201cIt got me off the streets, which is what she would have wanted me to do,\u201d she says. <\/a>Was it a challenge to persuade Wood to be so open? How do you handle difficult interviews?<\/span>I approached Wood on social media, and was straightforward that I was writing about this crash and wanted to talk to her about her mother. When talking with sources experiencing grief, I let them set the pace, hear out what they want to say, and circle back to follow-up questions when there\u2019s an opening in the conversation to do so.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Months later, Uber also settled with Herzberg\u2019s parents and son, says Herzberg\u2019s mom, Sharon Daly. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to cash the damn check because it would make it final,\u201d Daly told me over the phone, starting to weep. \u201cAnd I wanted her to come back.\u201d <\/a>Why did you interview her by phone?<\/span>With the pandemic making it harder to travel, I went to Arizona once and in that trip I focused on being as available as possible to talk to Vasquez, thoroughly exploring the area of the crash, and gathering records. When I made contact with Ms. Daly, she was very emotive by phone, and I thought her quotes conveyed her personality and sense of loss.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nWhile Uber stanched its civil liability, investigators kept pushing for new details. By mid-April, Vasquez was sitting for three hours\u2014with her Uber-paid lawyer and Uber\u2019s own attorney\u2014talking to investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board. According to the agency\u2019s record of the talk, she told them that, at work that night, she had stowed her personal phone in her purse behind her. Her work phone was on the passenger seat. She said she had been monitoring the Uber tablet that was mounted on the center console, then looked up and saw Herzberg.
\n
\nThen Tempe police started to receive information from the warrants to the streaming apps. YouTube and Netflix found no activity in the hours around the collision. But in late May, Hulu\u2019s legal team reported that after 9:16 pm, Vasquez\u2019s personal phone began streaming the talent show The Voice.<\/em> The episode stopped at 9:59. The crash happened at 9:58.
\n
\nAbout a month later, the police released hundreds of pages of investigative documents to the press\u2014including the seemingly damning report from Hulu. <\/a>Why did you use the qualifier \u201cseemingly?\u201d<\/span>Later, we\u2019re going to learn that Vasquez disputes the meaning of this evidence. Vasquez will eventually present her side in a court filing, that she wasn\u2019t watching Hulu, but listening to it and was instead monitoring Slack. So I want to foreshadow that there will be more to the story.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>The police analysis found that, if she\u2019d been looking at the road, Vasquez could have stopped more than 42 feet in front of Herzberg. They deemed the crash \u201centirely avoidable.\u201d
\n
\nAnd like that, the media focus shifted from Uber to Vasquez, sometimes in cartoonishly villainous terms. (A Daily Mail<\/em> headline: \u201cConvicted Felon Behind the Wheel of Uber Self-Driving Car Was Streaming The Voice<\/em> on Her Phone and Laughing Before Crash Which Killed a Pedestrian in Arizona.\u201d) Vasquez set a Google alert on her name and then couldn\u2019t stop reading every comment, including insults about her looks and being trans. \u201cI spiraled,\u201d she recalls. \u201cNow I\u2019m hearing things that I haven\u2019t heard since high school.\u201d Offended and hurt, she wondered what her gender identity had to do with the crash, and she shut down her social media accounts.
\n
\nFor months, Vasquez waited to see what the Maricopa County attorney would do. A charge of vehicular manslaughter could mean years in prison\u2014and the return of a familiar pattern in her life, a pattern of momentum turning against her.
\n
\n
\nRAFAELA VASQUEZ WAS<\/strong> born in suburban Maryland. Her mother died of a heart attack when she was just 3, so she was raised by her dad. He was born in Puerto Rico but moved to New York City in his early teens. He was hired at IBM and worked his way up to become a manager. The family followed his job, shifting through Georgia, Maryland, Arizona, and Virginia. <\/a>Why did you shift here to describe Vasquez\u2019s past?<\/span>We\u2019ve now established enough about this crash\u2019s larger landscape and are turning squarely to the investigation of Vasquez and the media flurry around her. So this is a good moment to learn more about who she is. I sometimes think magazine stories get into people\u2019s background too early, before the reader has really committed to the larger issues of the piece.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nIn the 1980s, when she was in grade school and junior high, her father brought home his company\u2019s debut PCs, seeding her love of gadgets as she spent hours engrossed in Pong<\/em>. But her dad was a strict Catholic and a former Marine sergeant who served in Vietnam, and he bristled at his child\u2019s femininity. He tried any number of interventions, Vasquez says, \u201cto pray the gay and military the gay away\u201d\u2014Catholic grade school, a soccer team, a military school for fifth grade called Linton Hall School. She was bullied all the way. \u201cI just didn\u2019t know what I was, I didn\u2019t have anybody to talk to,\u201d she says. She took solace in visiting her Aunt Janice, from her mom\u2019s family of Black Southern Baptists. \u201cEven though I know she didn\u2019t approve of me, she never treated me any different and still loved me.\u201d <\/a>How did you decide what to use from your to create such a revealing profile? Did this section require much revision?<\/span>This section was the most straightforward to write. It\u2019s chronological, moving through the relevant points of my interview with Vasquez. It\u2019s important to go through the exercise of deciding \u201cWhat is this story really<\/em> about?\u201d and carefully, thoughtfully, add the details that help the reader best see and understand your source. What leaped out in Vasquez\u2019s interview is she kept describing a lifelong desire for acceptance, love, and normalcy, but again and again, being cast out. Also, she spoke about how technology had always served as a welcome outlet, someplace she could find safety and self-fulfillment, very markedly with her pride in her Uber job prior to the crash.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nVasquez says she was sexually abused as a child\u2014by two priests, a coach, and a therapist. \u201cI thought it was me and there was something wrong with me, because every time we moved, I thought, \u2018OK, it\u2019s not gonna happen.\u2019 But it did; I was always very alone. I never had friends \u2026 I looked like the type of person that keeps a secret.\u201d Vasquez says she first attempted suicide in third grade.
\n
\nWhen she was in junior high, the family moved to Tucson and, she says, the sexual abuse finally stopped. But she still didn\u2019t have a word for how she felt; she\u2019d seen the \u201ctranssexuals\u201d on tabloid TV, eroticized in a way Vasquez didn\u2019t identify with. Gay didn\u2019t seem to describe it either. She took refuge in AOL chat\u00ad rooms, where she could talk to people who didn\u2019t know her in real life. Then she found an electronic dance club in town called the Fineline, where she first met transgender friends.
\n
\nIn high school, Vasquez worked up to a full face of goth makeup\u2014which also helped her conceal the bruises from getting beaten up by boys. Her hair was short in those days, but Vasquez stopped correcting people when they called her \u201cshe.\u201d She also began taking Premarin estrogen pills she bought off her trans friends for $2 a pop. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that it was called transitioning. All I knew is that I felt better.\u201d
\n
\nAfter graduation, Vasquez floated through a series of jobs, community college courses, classes at the University of Arizona. In her mid-twenties she met a guy at a rave in Phoenix. Josh, who she considered her first boyfriend, was six years her junior. By mid-2000, he was also on probation for stealing a car, and Vasquez was on probation for falsifying an unemployment claim. At the time, she was managing a Blockbuster video store in Scottsdale. One morning, she and a coworker drove to the bank to deposit $2,783 from the store\u2019s cash register into Blockbuster\u2019s corporate account. Vasquez\u2019s boyfriend rushed up to the car, pointing a handgun at them, according to a police report, and she handed over the cash. Yet a month later, police arrested Vasquez. Informants had told police that she had been in on the heist. In an interrogation, her boyfriend said the same.
\n
\nWhile Vasquez flatly denied involvement to the police, her bail was set at $70,800. She couldn\u2019t afford that, so she remained in the Maricopa County jail for five months, housed with male inmates. Vasquez says she was sexually assaulted by both inmates and guards, but other than telling her aunt about it, she didn\u2019t officially report the abuse. \u201cI\u2019d never had to have anal stitching before, but I had it in jail.\u201d
\n
\nShe pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery, and the judge sentenced her to five years in prison. Her ex-boyfriend, who\u2019d held the gun during the stickup and pleaded guilty to armed robbery\u2014a more serious felony\u2014was sentenced to four.
\n
\nIn prison, Vasquez was housed with men, wasn\u2019t allowed to take hormones, and says she again was regularly sexually assaulted. While there, she penned a letter to her dad\u2014\u201c62 pages front and back\u201d\u2014explaining that her gender identity wasn\u2019t going away. <\/a>Much of her story is presented through the third person point of video \u2014 a hallmark of creative nonfiction identified by Tom Wolfe. Why did you choose this approach rather than quoting her more extensively?<\/span>Choose quotes wisely. A writer can typically express something more clearly and succinctly than a quote does. Quotes are about showing emotion, personality, an interestingly phrased opinion, humor. A tidbit from a college journalism class has stuck with me: Don\u2019t quote a police officer saying, \u201cThe suspect\u2019s blood alcohol content was .12.\u201d Quote the officer saying, \u201cThey were drunk as a skunk.\u201d<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>The letter helped begin to repair their frayed relationship, and he came to visit her regularly and tried to start calling her by her preferred name. In the final year of her sentence, she was transferred to a low-security prison yard where she was able to socialize with other transgender inmates. They taught her to mix commissary goods with Vaseline or hair grease for makeup: Atomic Fireballs for lip gloss, a golf pencil for eyeliner, Kool-Aid for eyeshadow. She says the inmates tasked her with brewing contraband hooch\u2014out of water, sugar packets, bread, oranges, and Jolly Ranchers candy. <\/a>Why did you choose these details?<\/span>We\u2019re using details that go to the idea that Vasquez kept raising: acceptance and rejection \u2013\u00a0 she\u2019s finding her way as a transgender woman, even while being separated from everyday society in prison.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nShambling back to the Phoenix area in 2004, when she was 30, Vasquez soon moved in with a friend, drew disability checks for her languishing mental health, and dove into therapy. \u201cPrison really messed me up,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd it took me a long time to recover.\u201d She eventually sought out jobs that let her work from home\u2014taking tech-support calls for Cricket Wireless and Dell. Through contractors, she was hired for a string of remote jobs tweeting live commentary for The Bachelorette<\/em> and Dancing With the Stars<\/em> and moderating flagged content on Facebook. She signed up as a volunteer beta tester, exchanging avid feedback for free Plantronics headsets and iPads. \u201cPeople fear robots are going to take over the world and our jobs? I wanted<\/em> them to,\u201d she says. \u201cI like<\/em> robots.\u201d For one job, she wore a shirt with a camera embedded in a button and posed as a prospective tenant to surveil workers at leasing offices.
\n
\nWhen she was working consistently, she\u2019d bring in more than $40,000 a year\u2014enough to rent a house and support her rescue pit bulls, Sweetie and Romeo, and later Tyson. She found Tyson in a dumpster, when he was a puppy, sealed in a plastic bag. She related to pit bulls. \u201cThey\u2019re so misunderstood,\u201d she says. She knew what it was like to be judged by appearances, to have people be intimidated by her. \u201cI think I have an RBF: resting bitch face,\u201d she says. \u201cI get asked, \u2018Are you mad?\u2019 No.\u201d The dogs became her main companions, hunkering down with her at home as her reclusiveness veered into agoraphobia. When her Aunt Janice died, her emotional state plunged further. At times, she\u2019d leave the house only for late-night grocery runs for kibble or moonlit dog walks. \u201cIf I wouldn\u2019t have had dogs,\u201d she says, \u201cI would have just let myself waste away.\u201d
\n
\nIn 2015, Vasquez decided she needed to force herself out among people. So she signed up to drive for Lyft and Uber. She answered truthfully during Uber\u2019s onboarding: no felonies in the past seven years. And she felt OK picking up strangers a few nights a week. It was her car<\/em>, after all, and she could stop working if she got too anxious, or she could call the cops if a drunk wouldn\u2019t leave. Her agoraphobia began to ease as she chatted with the strangers who slid into the back seat.
\n
\nAfter a couple of years, Vasquez spotted an ad for Uber\u2019s self-driving unit. \u201cI aced the test,\u201d she says. In summer 2017, she flew to Pittsburgh for a weeklong boot camp. The self-driving Volvos were set up on a training track, and Vasquez learned to hover her hands around the wheel and her foot over the brake while the car drove itself. Touching either would take over control, which she had to do swiftly, as the trainers programmed the car to make mistakes. Recruits who erred were weeded out over the week; Vasquez made the cut and flew back to Tempe for more mentoring, working up to testing the cars on public roads. \u201cIt felt refreshing to me,\u201d she says. \u201cIt felt like I was starting over again.\u201d
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\n
\nIN THE WEEKS<\/strong> after Herzberg\u2019s death, Uber\u2019s Advanced Technologies Group held a number of all-hands meetings. The triage analyst remembers that CEO Eric Meyhofer had puffy eyes\u2014\u201clike he was not sleeping, and crying.\u201d Meyhofer and other leaders said they were cooperating with the police and federal investigators. They told staff that they weren\u2019t going to let the internal investigation turn into a blame game and would make no assumptions about Vasquez. Leadership told employees they could take time off or visit on-hand grief counselors.
\n
\nWith the cars off the road, the company also dove into its own technical soul-searching\u2014doing a self-assessment about the crash and Uber\u2019s safety practices and creating a panel of safety advisers, including a former administrator of the NHTSA.
\n
\nThe excavation of facts was unflattering: Uber told the NTSB that its tech had never identified Herzberg as a person. Nearly every time the system changed what it thought Herzberg was\u2014a car, a bike, other\u2014it started from scratch in calculating where the object might be headed, that is, across the road into the Volvo\u2019s lane. Uber had programmed the car to delay hard braking for one second to allow the system to verify the emergency\u2014and avoid false alarms\u2014and for the human to take over. The system would brake hard only if it could entirely avoid the crash, otherwise it would slow down gradually and warn the operator. In other words, by the time it deemed it couldn\u2019t entirely avoid Herzberg that night, the car didn\u2019t slam on the brakes, which might have made the impact less severe. Volvo ran its own tests after the crash, it told the NTSB, and found that its automatic braking system, the one Uber overrode for its own system, would have prevented the crash in 17 out of 20 scenarios and would have reduced the speed of impact in the other three.
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\n\u201cPrior to this crash, I think there was a lot of recognition among industry that \u2018There but for the grace of God go I. We\u2019re trying to be responsible, but something could happen,\u2019\u201d says Bryant Walker Smith, the self-driving scholar. \u201cWhen the crash happened, it turned from this \u2018Oh, my goodness, this could happen to anybody\u2019 to \u2018Well, yeah, of course, it was Uber<\/em>.\u2019\u201d
\n
\nAs more information was released, Uber staffers were becoming increasingly frustrated by the company\u2019s leaders. \u201cPeople were blunt about it being a massive fuckup, and there being moral culpability, and that the company needed to change,\u201d Barentine says. The triage analyst wondered if he was \u201cimplicitly involved in this. Is this blood on my hands?\u201d
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\n\u201cThese are people who came to work here because of the promise of self-driving and this utopian future,\u201d a Pittsburgh-based manager told me. \u201cIt was a pretty big body blow, that they felt like they contributed to something so severe.\u201d
\n
\nThe company threw out its plan to put a driverless taxi into service by the end of 2018; the new target was 2022. \u201cEverything was defined by that event,\u201d the manager says of the crash. \u201cIt put us in a really stark view of what the car was actually capable of doing. It was nowhere near what the public perception was.\u201d
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\nOne morning in late May, the nearly 300 benched Tempe employees were told to report to Ghost Town. When the supervisor arrived for the meeting, he saw that senior staff had flown in. \u201cI was like, \u2018Oooooohh crap.\u2019\u201d Austin Geidt, an operations head who would ring the stock exchange bell when Uber went public a year later, addressed the group: Arizona had rejected their proposals to stay. Everyone was laid off.
\n
\nEmployees received two months of pay under state law, and another two months in an Uber separation package with a non-disclosure agreement. <\/a>How did you get around the non-disclosures when you interviewed former Uber workers?<\/span>Some simply thought getting their experience out there was worth it. Being anonymous was enough for many to feel comfortable speaking.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Uber says Vasquez received a severance package too, in 2018, but would not say how much.) After the announcement, people met with HR reps on hand, said goodbyes in shock. The supervisor recalls an opera-singing operator bellowing strains of \u201cAve Maria\u201d to the dwindling ranks as a coda.
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\nNow some of Vasquez\u2019s fellow operators pointed the finger squarely at her. Many of the nine operators who talked to me accepted\u2014and took pride in\u2014their role in preventing crashes. <\/a>How did you decide that you\u2019d talked to enough operators?<\/span>I emailed even more, and I would have talked to anyone who replied. You simply don\u2019t know who is going to have the revealing anecdote. Former operators could talk through what it was like on the job, how they were affected by the company\u2019s policy, in a way no one else could.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>I asked Beltran, who\u2019d been fired for looking at his phone: Wasn\u2019t his own lapse just a degree or two removed from Vasquez gazing at her phone for several seconds at a time? \u201cNo, no, no, no, no,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat\u2019s like going above and beyond not doing your job.\u201d
\n
\nThat summer, the Advanced Technologies Group also laid off 100 operators in Pittsburgh and San Francisco and ended its self-driving-truck program. The hundreds of remaining staff would focus on cars in a new era that was hyper-focused on improving safety.
\n
\nAt some point, court documents show, a technical program manager phoned police detective Thomas Haubold, who was leading the Tempe investigation. In a 48-minute recorded conversation, the caller said he was worried Vasquez was going to take too much of the blame and that a larger problem would be obscured: that in its quest to get as many cars on the road as quickly as possible, Uber had ignored risks. He told Haubold not to trust Uber to be totally forthcoming. The company, the insider said, was \u201cvery clever about liability as opposed to being smart about responsibility.\u201d <\/a>What tools did you use to collect all the various types of information for the story?<\/span>I use really simple tools, really. The biggest tool is staying organized as I go, or else a project of this complexity would quickly become overwhelming. I keep all the digital material in an online drive. I track the progress of all my records requests in a spreadsheet. The timelines and outlines are in documents with links to sources. As I read hundreds of pages from my records requests, I note the page numbers of important parts in another document and some of those go into the timeline too. A secondary benefit of doing this is I can then share all of the above with the fact-checker at the end of the process.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe call seemed to make little impact. A year after the crash, an Arizona prosecutor announced that the state would not criminally charge Uber in the fatality. The next month, the Advanced Technologies Group received a $1 billion investment from SoftBank, Denso, and Toyota, valuing the division at $7.25 billion, three weeks before Uber\u2019s IPO.
\n
\nAll along, some employees were surprised that no leaders had been fired because of Herz\u00adberg\u2019s death or in the disarray that followed. Now, with criminal charges off the table for Uber, Vasquez sat in legal purgatory alone.
\n
\n
\nSTANDING IN LINE<\/strong> at Chipotle one day, Vasquez remembers hearing a voice: Is that the person who killed that lady?<\/em> Vasquez made a beeline for the door. After photos of her face and the video of her in the Volvo circulated in the media, Vasquez tried to make herself invisible. She kept her hair straight to avoid drawing attention with the braids of multicolor yarn she used to love wearing. When she had to go to the grocery store, she would calm her nerves in the parking lot, then dash in\u2014or simply pick things up curbside. When Covid hit, she felt utterly relieved to put on a mask.
\n
\nLaid off alongside the other Tempe staff, Vasquez tried to stretch her savings\u2014along with, eventually, disability payments for her mental health\u2014as best she could. At one point, Vasquez applied for a job at Taco Bell to test her prospects. Try back after your legal issues have settled down<\/em>, she says she was told. It\u2019s bad publicity<\/em>.<\/a>Why did you put these in italics?<\/span>It\u2019s Vasquez\u2019s recollection of the quote, so italics indicate this is the gist of what was said, not the exact words.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Lying low from the media and anyone who might recognize her, she says she lived for months with her dogs in a string of Motel 6\u2019s.
\n
\nVasquez eventually moved to Tucson, where she cared for her father, who was being treated for cancer. With dwindling money and limited space, she had to give up her dogs, another blow as isolation set in. \u201cBefore, I chose to be alone,\u201d she says. \u201cThis time, I felt as if I was alone because nobody wanted to be around me.\u201d Most distressingly, she stopped the therapy that had helped her for years, wanting to avoid any risk that her therapist would get subpoenaed. When friends asked her about what they\u2019d read about the case, Vasquez would tell them, \u201cIt\u2019s not true.\u201d But she couldn\u2019t elaborate.
\n
\nWhen she heard the news of the indictment, Vasquez struggled to breathe.
\n
\nIn November 2019, a year and a half after the crash, the NTSB released its final report. The 78-page document didn\u2019t carry legal heft; it was aimed at preventing future accidents. But it called out what it said was the probable cause of the crash: Vasquez was distracted by her \u201cpersonal cell phone.\u201d The report also called her distraction a \u201ctypical effect of automation complacency\u201d\u2014and said that Vasquez was far from the only contributor to the accident. The board\u2019s findings also targeted federal and state agencies\u2019 lax regulations and\u2014the focus of much of the report\u2014Uber\u2019s \u201cinadequate safety culture.\u201d In an NTSB board meeting, vice chair Bruce Landsberg said, \u201cThere\u2019s enough responsibility to go around here on all sides.\u201d NTSB chair Robert Sumwalt focused on Uber: \u201cThe collision was the last link of a long chain of actions and decisions made by an organization that unfortunately did not make safety the top priority.\u201d Still, NTSB investigator David Pereira praised Uber\u2019s cooperation and its post-crash safety changes to ward off further incidents.
\n
\nShortly thereafter, the state of Arizona, fighting a negligence lawsuit from Herzberg\u2019s daughter in civil court, also partially blamed Uber, alleging the company was \u201cvicariously liable\u201d for its employee. (The case was dismissed.) <\/a>The story deftly toggles between multiple timelines? How did you keep track of them?<\/span>By and large, the structure is chronological. This was an insight from my editor John Gravois, who rescued the middle sections somewhere in the revision process with some excellent reordering.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAs for criminal charges, nearly a year after that report, in August 2020, Maricopa County prosecutors brought their evidence against Vasquez before a grand jury. And that\u2019s how Rafaela Vasquez\u2014and only Rafaela Vasquez\u2014was indicted for allegedly causing the first pedestrian death by a self-driving car.
\n
\n
\nTHE CHARGE WAS<\/strong> negligent homicide with a dangerous instrument. She faced four to eight years in prison if convicted. When she heard the news, Vasquez curled into the fetal position on her father\u2019s bedroom floor, struggling to breathe as he tried to calm her. \u201cIt was a nightmare,\u201d she says. \u201cI was just devastated, beyond devastated by it.\u201d
\n
\nVasquez brought on a new legal team that was not paid by Uber. Last summer, her two new lawyers loosed Vasquez\u2019s defense in a pretrial legal filing: Yes, she was streaming The Voice<\/em> on Hulu, the defense wrote\u2014but she wasn\u2019t watching it; she was listening<\/em> to it. And that was something operators were allowed to do. The police report says that Hulu was installed only on her personal phone, the one with the metallic case. The video, they argue, shows Vasquez at the beginning of her shift, placing the phone with the black<\/em> case\u2014her work phone\u2014near her right knee in the center console, where she was gazing. And that phone didn\u2019t have Hulu. When Vasquez was looking at that phone for several seconds at a time, the defense writes, she was monitoring the company Slack, \u201cdoing her job.\u201d Her personal phone, on the other hand, was significantly farther away, on the passenger seat. This differs from what Vasquez told the NTSB, but her attorneys argue the video is clear, and exculpatory: After the crash, the dashcam shows her reaching over to the passenger side to grab her personal phone and call 911.
\n
\nBarentine says that the Arizona operators chatted in many Slack employee channels, and various Slack alerts could come in from managers. Monitoring those alerts had previously been the second operator\u2019s job; solo operators were supposed to check Slack on breaks or when pulled over, several employees told me. (Vasquez\u2019s defense team, in their filing, claim that Slack had to be monitored in real time.) If they didn\u2019t quiet or pare down their notifications, Barentine speculates, \u201cthey could have been getting what felt like alerts all the time.\u201d
\n
\nThe filing appears to be Slack\u2019s debut in the public record of the moments leading to the crash: Police reports don\u2019t indicate that Vasquez ever discussed her phones on the night of the accident, and the NTSB\u2019s notes of their interview with her don\u2019t show her mentioning using Slack right before the crash. But both of those interviews took place before the police\u2019s Hulu accusation became public. (Neither Tempe police nor the county attorney would comment for this story, citing the pending case.)
\n
\nVasquez\u2019s attorneys argued that a new grand jury should be convened; the one that indicted Vasquez heard police testify only that Vasquez was watching<\/em> TV and never heard a spate of other evidence: about Uber\u2019s decisions that made the fatality more likely, about the concept of automation complacency, about the whistleblower\u2019s call to police saying not to trust the tech behemoth.
\n
\nThen, in February, the ruling came down: The case would move ahead toward trial, with no new grand jury. Vasquez and her lawyers won\u2019t comment on their legal strategy, but Michael Piccarreta, an Arizona defense attorney and former head of the state\u2019s bar association, reviewed the case for WIRED. <\/a>Why did you choose an outside expert to review the case?<\/span>I needed an expert who doesn\u2019t have a horse in the race. But for that very reason, few are willing to invest the time to review filings, so I am always so grateful to people who do.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0He says Vasquez\u2019s lawyers can further challenge the February ruling or else present their views of the evidence at trial\u2014unless their client opts to avoid one altogether. Vasquez could seek a plea deal, Piccarreta says, potentially reducing a prison sentence that could come down if she is found guilty.
\n
\nThe outcome of a trial, Piccarreta explains, would hang on whether Vasquez \u201cgrossly deviated\u201d from the standard of care that a \u201creasonable person\u201d in her place would have taken, the definition of negligent homicide in Arizona. To Vasquez\u2019s defense team, that \u201creasonable person\u201d is not a driver but rather an operator of a self-driving Uber; even the NTSB, they add, says that distraction is a typical and even predictable effect of automation complacency. The attorneys draw attention to the fact that Herzberg\u2019s judgment was impaired by drugs, and that she was illegally jaywalking at night in a dark coat where posted signs say not to. They highlight the NTSB investigation\u2019s findings against Uber and how the company worked \u201chand-in-glove\u201d with Tempe police. \u201cIt was folly to rely on unverified claims made with a company with deep pockets and an interest in minimizing its liability,\u201d their legal filing states. \u201cBy assisting the police in the investigation, the company could steer the investigation, enabling it to offload its liability to Ms. Vasquez.\u201d (Moir, the former Tempe police chief, defends her department\u2019s investigation and dismisses the idea that police \u201cwould favor a relationship over evidence.\u201d)
\n
\nIn public statements and legal filings, the prosecution has treated Vasquez as a distracted driver. But to win, Piccarreta says, the county needs to prove that Vasquez was \u201cgrossly\u201d negligent. \u201cIf she\u2019s just<\/em> negligent, she\u2019s not guilty.\u201d The prosecutors would, he says, \u201cneed something to really get the jury upset at her.\u201d <\/a>If someone took a photo of your desk as you worked on this story, what would it reveal?<\/span>Former coworkers would laugh at this: My desk tends towards disarray. But there is a method to the madness, I promise. There\u2019d be a manila folder with the physical documents that I\u2019d gathered in Arizona. A tape recorder. Post-its with tiny \u201cto do\u201d lists for the next few hours. Coffee. Notably absent while I\u2019m writing is my cell phone, because I want to focus. The desktop of my computer is even scarier: so many tabs open it maxes out the browser width, a digital hoarder thing. But in the ways that really matter, I am quite organized \u2014 and that\u2019s in these outlines and chronologies and spreadsheets. I want to help the \u2018future me\u2019 who will eventually need to make sense of this mountain of information and write a draft.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nSome former Uber staffers who spoke with me do feel troubled that a lone frontline employee has been singled out. \u201cI felt shame when I heard,\u201d Barentine says of Vasquez being charged. \u201cWe owed Rafaela better oversight and support. We also put her in a tough position.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cYou can\u2019t put the blame on just that one person,\u201d says the Pittsburgh manager. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s absurd.\u201d Uber \u201chad to know this would happen. We get distracted in regular<\/em> driving,\u201d the manager says.
\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like somebody got into their car and decided to run into someone,\u201d says the triage analyst. \u201cThey were working within a framework. And that framework created the conditions that allowed that to happen.\u201d As for why Uber didn\u2019t and won\u2019t face criminal charges, Piccarreta says, \u201cThey\u2019re one step removed, unless when you examine the process, they put the cars out knowing this was going to happen and just didn\u2019t care.\u201d Uber, he says, has a built-in defense: that it put a human in there for the very purpose of avoiding crashes.
\n
\nOf course, if the case goes to trial, only the jury\u2019s opinion will matter. Vasquez knows that fair consideration of the evidence would require a jury to open-mindedly weigh the actions of a transgender woman gasping in the crash video. The county attorney has already asked for permission to question Vasquez about her 20-year-old crimes, though Piccarreta predicts the judge won\u2019t allow it. After reading the online vitriol against her, Vasquez says, \u201cDo I think I could get a fair trial, if it ever came to that? No.\u201d
\n
\n
\nIN AUGUST, IN<\/strong> an area of a Phoenix suburb where Waymo vans ferry customers around with no human pilot at all, Vasquez steered an aging sedan into an office park in the withering, near-100-degree heat. On the way here, she was paranoid that other drivers would recognize her, even though, rationally, she knew they couldn\u2019t see through her dark-tinted windows. After she parked, she strode into her lawyer\u2019s office and slid behind an imposing wooden conference table. Flowing leopard-print pants disguised her clunky ankle monitor. A dainty headband crested her head, and a triad of piercings, a holdover from her goth years, dotted her chin.
\n
\nAfter three and a half years of public silence, Vasquez had shown up to talk to me about what she\u2019s been through. <\/a>Why did you wait until this point to reveal that you interviewed Vasquez?<\/span>The subdek and packaging of the story makes it clear I\u2019ve spoken to Vasquez, so it\u2019s up to us where we want to place the scene of the interview. The structure has moved chronologically, and my interview with her doesn\u2019t come until somewhere near the end. So placing this higher up would have been injecting some future moment in the chronology, yanking the reader out of time. Lastly, we\u2019re now shifting into the big picture themes that we\u2019re going to conclude with, so this scene starts that transition into some type of closure: Vasquez arriving in person after everything we\u2019ve just read has happened, to reflect on where she\u2019s at now.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>For nearly seven hours\u2014never asking for a break\u2014her stories gushed out in wounded torrents. <\/a>How did you persuade Rafaela Vasquez to talk with you?<\/span>I told her legal team that I wanted to write about her experience, mentioning the dearth of public information about her, and that federal investigators had cited many<\/em> factors playing into the crash while Vasquez was the only one getting criminally blamed.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHer hurt and anger, about the sexual abuse, everything she has endured as trans, radiated. Her candor and wry sense of humor seared. When she was talking about the beatings she took from high school bullies, her voice caught with emotion. She once interrupted herself to question whether anyone wants to hear from her. \u201cNobody\u2019s gonna care, right?\u201d Her attorneys sat nearby, tapping on laptops with an ear half-open\u2014making sure we stayed within the guardrails we\u2019d agreed to. No questions about the case.
\n
\n\u201cI feel betrayed in a way,\u201d Vasquez told me. \u201cAt first everybody was all on my side, even the chief of police. Now it\u2019s the opposite. It was literally, one day I\u2019m fine and next day I\u2019m the villain. It\u2019s very\u2014it\u2019s isolating.\u201d
\n
\nThere was a time, right around when Vasquez started to drive for Uber to force herself out of the house, that the self-driving revolution seemed right around the corner. Companies brayed about rapid timelines; zeitgeist-chasing tech workers wanted to get into the hyped space before the problem was already solved.
\n
\n\u201cYou can\u2019t put the blame on just that one person. It\u2019s absurd.\u201d
\n
\nHerzberg\u2019s death punctured that promise, and recent years have seen the industry humbled. The projections of full autonomy\u2014not just on highways, which are seen as the easier task; not just on certain routes in Houston, San Francisco, and Phoenix; but everywhere\u2014are now much further out. At the end of 2020, Uber offloaded the Advanced Technologies Group and hundreds of employees to a company called Aurora, buying a 26 percent stake and a guarantee to use its tech in the future. The electric-vehicle self-driving startup Zoox was sold to Amazon. Lyft sold its autonomous division to a subsidiary of Toyota. <\/a>At this point, the story seems to be drawing to a close. What was your intention as you structured, composed and revised these final paragraphs?<\/span>We\u2019re tying up all the threads: what\u2019s going on with Uber and the self-driving industry; with Arizona, and with Vasquez. The legacy of this crash for all of them.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAnthony Levandowski\u2014a controversial early star of the self-driving industry\u2014said in a recent interview that the tech just isn\u2019t there yet for autonomous road vehicles. He has dedicated his new startup to hauling rocks at mines. Tesla is now under investigation by the US Department of Transportation because 11 of its cars have crashed into parked emergency vehicles while in Autopilot or cruise control. At one NTSB hearing on a fatal Tesla crash, then agency chair Sumwalt said, \u201cIt\u2019s time to stop enabling drivers in any partially automated vehicle to pretend that they have driverless cars.\u201d <\/a>How did you get this quote? Did you attend the hearing?<\/span>I started my reporting long after the hearing, so for this and many other parts of the investigative process in this piece, I had to use the available public records, videos, statements and press.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nLast fall, in an echo of Vasquez\u2019s case, Los Angeles County prosecutors charged a Tesla driver with vehicular manslaughter when his car, reportedly in Autopilot mode, ran a red light, crashed into another vehicle, and killed two people inside. <\/a>Why did you use the qualifier “reportedly”?<\/span>That case was pretrial, and more facts may come out, so we wanted to cast this in the realm of allegations.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(The driver pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a hearing.) This time, it wasn\u2019t an employee of a self-driving company facing charges but a private citizen who allegedly failed to correct his own erring car. The message: Vasquez\u2019s situation could be yours too.
\n
\nWhile the Tempe crash sobered the industry, it\u2019s also, in some ways, receding in the rearview mirror. Autonomous test cars from eight companies trek across Arizona\u2019s roads today. More than two years after sending his stern letter suspending the Advanced Technologies Group from the state, Governor Ducey emailed Khosrowshahi. A California judge had just ruled against the company\u2019s gig-worker labor model; Ducey asked the CEO for a \u201cconversation about ways our state can be a partner in ensuring Uber\u2019s continued success \u2026 Arizona is open for business and we would be honored to support Uber\u2019s long-term growth.\u201d
\n
\nStudies and support groups attest that people who have accidentally played a role in a death are tormented by an amalgam of survivor\u2019s guilt, trauma, and moral injury, no matter what happens in the justice system. In our interview, Vasquez couldn\u2019t talk about how she felt about Herzberg\u2019s death; it veered too close to the case. Still, I imagined that being part of a cyborg of human and technical factors that ended a life must stir a deep but confusing form of grief. She is the first to shoulder this harrowing tech-age version of an old and primal pain. <\/a>What about your reporting and writing made it possible to draw this conclusion?<\/span>This question of how one contends \u2014 not just in the legal system, but personally \u2014 with an accidental death is a huge reason I was drawn to this story in the first place. But Vasquez\u2019s attorneys wouldn\u2019t let me talk so directly with her about the crash. I thought it was very important that the reader knows that it\u2019s not that Vasquez doesn\u2019t have any feelings about Herzberg\u2019s death; it\u2019s simply that she wasn\u2019t allowed to talk about it in the interview. So I had to take on a little bit of the emotional work myself. I framed the thought with \u201cI imagined\u201d to make it clear this is my informed conjecture. It\u2019s still based on quite a bit of evidence: Vasquez\u2019s comments at the scene of the crash and her attorneys previously telling<\/a> a journalist that Vasquez was \u201cdevastated by the loss of life.\u201d I also learned a lot about people contending with accidental deaths or injuries from reading articles, online message boards, academic studies and essays that some others have penned.<\/span> <\/span>
\n
\nWhen we met, Vasquez was spending her days raising her niece and nephew and visiting her 84-year-old father in the hospital. He had stuck by her through the case, the closest family she had left. In recent years he\u2019d stopped slipping up and saying \u201cson\u201d and had started to call her his daughter. \u201cI know he loves me,\u201d she says. A month after the interview, he died. She was left to grieve, a loss that piled onto her ongoing despair about the case. About what prison would mean if she were again housed with men. About the next Google alert for Rafaela Vasquez.
\n
\nWhich brings her to the plan. <\/a>Why did you set up the conclusion with this sentence?<\/span>It\u2019s one last bit of suspense. \u201cA plan\u201d is about the future and it connotes agency over one\u2019s life, while much of this drawn-out legal case has been out of Vasquez\u2019s control. While it would be bizarre for a reader to give up one graf from the end, hopefully this sentence drives them forward with curiosity and anticipation.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nSomeday, Vasquez will walk into county court, not for a criminal hearing but on a more self-actualizing mission: to legally change her gender and her name. She\u2019ll choose the name that she once dreamed her mother gave her, the one her dad and friends called her, the one she asked me not to print because making it public would defeat the point. <\/a>Was this an ethical decision you had to wrestle with?<\/span>My mentor, the fantastic writer Elizabeth Weil, teaches a concept of leaning into the problem. So instead of sitting there thinking \u2018I can\u2019t use this name, what now?\u2019 write<\/em> that she didn\u2019t want you to use the name. That says something more revealing and powerful than the name itself, which wouldn\u2019t mean that much to readers anyway.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Uber, the first self-driving pedestrian death, the toxic comments and Google searches, will stay behind with Rafaela and with the male name on the court documents. The catastrophe will be tethered to the \u201cM\u201d that never described her anyway.
\n
\nShe will make the change once the case is done. Once the attention ebbs. \u201cThat way,\u201d she explains, like a woman who has thought this through, \u201cit could be like a past life.\u201d She will slip back into society; few will know the rest. <\/a>Why did you decide to conclude the story this why and did you consider any alternatives?<\/span>My first draft had Vasquez\u2019s \u201cpast life\u201d quote as the end. But my editor, Maria Streshinsky, expertly plucked this sentence out of the final paragraph, and suggested it for the ending. Brilliant. Instead of looking back with \u201cpast life,\u201d it moves us into Vasquez\u2019s hope for the future, for eventual acceptance that she\u2019s been grappling with all along. Also, it\u2019s a subtle nod to readers who have stayed with me for 10,000 words: they are now part of the crew that knows \u201cthe rest.\u201d<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n* * *<\/strong>
\n
\nChip Scanlan <\/strong>is an award-winning newspaper reporter who taught writing at The Poynter Institute for 15\u00a0 years. He publishes Chip\u2019s Writing Lessons<\/a> and has two books, \u201dWriters on Writing\u201d and \u201c33 Ways Not To Screw Up Your Journalism.”<\/em>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lauren Smiley of Wired spent four years tracking the first pedestrian fatality involving a bicyclist, Uber and a self-driving car<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[13],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-2431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-chip-scanlan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReconstructing a murky maze of blame - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2023\/06\/01\/investigative-journalism-public-records-narrative-structure-uber-fatal-crash\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reconstructing a murky maze of blame - 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