Leaving her after-school job for the night, 17-year-old Chelsea Smith was tired, hungry, and dreading the homework that awaited her as she cruised down Hwy. 169 toward home. When her smartphone beeped with a text message from her boyfriend, she did what many people do without giving it a thought: She picked up the phone, slid her thumb across the screen and began to read.
It would take just a few seconds.
But as her car drifted to the side and the rumble strip on the freeway's edge growled, she yanked on the steering wheel and panicked. The next thing she remembers, a stranger was standing over her, trying to pull her out of her mangled Pontiac as flames shot from the hood. A State Patrol officer later told her she had killed a man.
"I just started scream-crying right away," she recalled recently. "I felt sick ... throughout my whole body."
Smith had crossed the median and crashed into an oncoming car, she learned later, smashing in the driver's side and killing 27-year-old Zachary Anderson. Anderson, who had just moved into a house he bought in St. James, was on his way to see a band in the Twin Cities.
Smith didn't admit to using a cellphone during the crash at first, but eventually she pleaded guilty to it. Her sentence included a year of probation, six months of a suspended license and 100 hours of community service, she said.
"Honestly I had it really easy," she said.
Anderson's mother, Bernice Benson, wrote an e-mail to friends and family after the sentencing saying it was hard for her to watch Smith plead guilty. "My heart broke because it could have been so many of our children, standing up there," she wrote. "As our lives will never be the same, I doubt that hers will either."