Uber employees helped police find the correct footage, which would play a key role in the investigation: video of Vasquez in the driver’s seat as the car navigated the route; then from Vasquez staring at her right knee, at the bottom console. Her looks down averaged 2.56 seconds, but on an early loop, on the same stretch of road where the crash was due, she looked down for over 26 seconds. Sometimes the researchers thought she appeared to be grinning. In the seconds before the car hit Herzberg, Vasquez looked down for about five seconds. Just before the impact, she looked up and gasped.
The media descended on the story the next day. Immediately quoted experts as criticizing lax regulations in Arizona, calling for a national moratorium on testing, and saying fatalities are inevitable when developing such a technology.
Initially, Vasquez says, she was reassured by the police’s public stance. Then-Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir told the… San Francisco Chronicle“It’s very clear that it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any mode (autonomous or driven) based on how she came straight from the shadows into the roadway.” Uber, she said, “probably wouldn’t be to blame,” though she’s not ruling out charges against the human pilot.
After that interview, Moir told me, emails pulsating with “unbearable rage” flooded her inbox, accusing Moir of complicity in Tempe’s self-driving experiments and blaming Herzberg for her own death. People were angry and wanted to be held accountable. As the hours ticked by, reporters began to dig up as much detail about Vasquez as they could — including information about an 18-year-old felony for which she had spent just under four years in prison.
By the end of the day, a search warrant had been issued for every cell phone Vasquez carried in the Volvo “to determine if Rafaela was distracted.” Maybe that would show what she was so interested in, at her knee. The warrant also listed the crime now under investigation: vehicular manslaughter.
Two nights later In the crash, a trio of police officers gathered outside room 227 at a Motel 6 in Tucson. Vasquez had checked in because, she says, reporters were crowding her apartment. The first days had shaken her. “I knew everything was happening; I just couldn’t believe it was happening. I was in shock.” As she greeted the police, she seemed calm, but a little tense; her lawyer didn’t want her to answer questions, she told them. They were there to wrap up her phones as evidence. Initially, she told told the officers that she only had her work phone with her in the car during the accident, but she ended up handing over two LG phones — the one she was using for work, with a black case, she explained, and her personal one, in a metal housing.
The next morning, police showed that no calls or texts had been made in the minutes before the accident. Then, according to police reports, the police went into the apps. Were any videos playing at the time of the crash? Search warrants went to Netflix, Hulu and YouTube.
Tempe police also considered making the Volvo’s dashcam footage from the moments leading up to the crash public. Maricopa County attorney Bill Montgomery told them that releasing the video, who was in police custody at the time, could jeopardize their suspect’s right to a fair trial. But Moir says the police were under “considerable” public pressure 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, an operator in Tempe, gathered with others who had come to Ghost Town, and they watched Vasquez’s video. “Most of us,” he says, “we went, ‘What the hell was she looking at?'”
As the investigation progressed, half a dozen Advanced Technologies Group employees from other offices in Tempe arrived. In the police garage, officers allowed in while the company downloaded the data from the impounded car so it could analyze what the system had been up to that night.
