The one night I turned off my phone was when my best friend Roy desperately called after a fatal crash. When I heard his panicked voicemail the next morning – ‘Paul, he’s dead! What do I do?’ – it was too late to help.

Part of our marketing for Reed & Reed is the fact that we are always reachable by phone—my clients call me directly on my cell, and I basically always have it on me. There’s even a commercial we have on TV, where we’re out fishing. I start to walk away, and LeeAnn calls after me, “Dad! You forgot your phone!” then I walk back to get it. It’s become part of our branding—we never turn off our phones.

But to me, it’s not just a tagline. There is a reason I never, ever turn off my cell phone…

and it’s because of what happened to my best friend, Roy Margison, on October 31st of 2010.

It was Halloween night. Even back then, I didn’t usually turn off my phone—the kids might need to reach me, or whatever—but I had read somewhere that you needed to turn off your cell phone occasionally, so it could install updates (at least, that’s how phones were back then). Since it was about 9 p.m. on Halloween, I thought, No one’s gonna need me tonight. I figured they’d all be busy with festivities. I turned off my phone and went to bed. Little did I know, that night was about to go very wrong for Roy.

At 9:44 p.m., Roy called me in a panic. A few minutes earlier, he had been leaving his house on Branch Forbes road. His house is in the middle of nowhere, and the property is lined with oak trees. The house itself sits way in the back, and there’s a fence that extends the length of the property. The fence is built with an opening for the dirt road driveway. It doesn’t have a gate on it. The opening in the fence is only wide enough to allow one vehicle to enter or exit the property at a time. Roy had a few beers earlier that night. At some point that evening, he decided to drive to the store, which was about a half mile away, to get some smokes. This was a little after 9:30 p.m. As Roy was leaving the driveway to make a left-hand turn, his son Austin pulled up in his pickup truck to come up to the house. Because only one vehicle could fit through at a time, Austin pulled up into the drive as far as he could to wait for Roy to pull out—his truck was about half on the road and half off. His headlights were shining directly in Roy’s eyes, plus the other side of the drive was all oak trees. From where Roy was, there was no way to see that there was a motorcycle speeding toward them from down the road.

Now, the motorcyclist had been out all day drinking with his biker buddies. He’d come home earlier, picked up his seventeen or eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, and took her to the Scoreboard Lounge, where he’d continued drinking. Then he decided to go home. When the accident occurred, the motorcyclist was three times the legal blood alcohol limit. He was speeding at eighty miles per hour northbound down this dark road, with his stepdaughter on the back of his bike. The speed limit there was forty-five miles per hour.

Roy pulled out around Austin’s truck to head southbound on Bell Shoals Road. It’s unclear what happened next. It could be that the motorcyclist didn’t see Austin’s truck until it was too late and tried to veer to the left to avoid smashing into the back of it—remember, Austin’s truck was half on the road and half off, so the motorcyclist may not have seen his tail lights. Or it could be that the motorcyclist swerved for some other reason. Either way, the exact moment the front of Roy’s car cleared the back of Austin’s truck, the motorcyclist swerved into the southbound lane, lost control, and crashed directly into Roy’s car.

The impact spun Roy’s vehicle 140 degrees clockwise and knocked it 200 feet in the opposite direction. His car stopped when it struck a large oak tree.

At 9:44 p.m., I got the panicked call:

“Paul, he’s dead! He’s dead! What do I do? What do I do?!?”

Remember, I turned off my phone that night before going to bed. I never do that! So, when I finally turned my phone back on the next morning, I heard the message.I will never forget that message: “Paul, he’s dead! He’s dead!

Oh my God! Where are you?” I could hear screaming in the background. The girl was still alive. I could not make out what she was saying, but it was a scream I will never forget. She sustained serious injuries from the crash, as one might imagine.

By the time I listened to the voicemail the next morning, it was too late to tell Roy what to do, or what not to do.

To this day, I am not sure what advice I would have given my best friend. Would I have told him to run? Would I have told him to tell the police he was not driving? Would I have told him to say someone at the house who was not intoxicated was driving? I guess we will never know. (I usually never turned off my phone. Why that night? Maybe God was looking out for me that night.)

Roy was eventually arrested and ended up being sentenced to four years in prison for DUI manslaughter.

Before I go deeper into how that all played out, I want to mention that Roy was injured, too. It had been a serious impact, plus his car had spun out and hit a tree. The motorcyclist did not have insurance, but Roy had uninsured motorist coverage through his wife, Michelle’s, policy. I submitted a settlement demand for the $10,000 uninsured policy limit to the insurance company.

Upon receiving the demand, the insurance company’s adjuster called me. He asked why they should tender the policy limits when Roy was being charged with DUI manslaughter? A legitimate question.

My response was short and sweet: “I don’t care what the state of Florida is charging my client with. He wasn’t at fault for the crash.” I explained the details of the crash to him, emphasized the fact that the motorcyclist had a blood alcohol level in excess of three times the legal limit, and was traveling over eighty miles per hour…

“This is what caused the crash.” They paid the $10,000 policy limits. In addition to Roy’s arrest, Roy and Michelle (Michelle was the owner of the car) got sued by the deceased man’s estate, and by the girl who was on the back of the bike.

Luckily, Michelle’s auto policy had bodily injury coverage. I knew the defense attorney hired to defend Roy and Michelle, and I was able to help my friend hire an accident reconstruction company to recreate the crash. (The accident reconstructionist was also a friend.) To say this was expensive would be an understatement. The reconstructionist company had to buy a motorcycle similar to the one in the accident, a truck that was similar to Austin’s, and a car that was similar to Roy’s. Then they hired off-duty police to shut down the road from sunset to sunrise. It looked like a Hollywood movie set out there. We were there from sunset until the next morning, running scenarios, and in the end, I had a video and a virtual reality video that showed Roy was not at fault for the crash. The videos showed: If the motorcyclist hadn’t been speeding, the crash would not have occurred. Roy would have pulled into the southbound lane of travel, Austin would have pulled into the driveway, and the motorcyclist would have driven by the house with plenty of room to spare.

C’est la vie.

DUI manslaughter comes with a maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison. DUI with serious bodily injury also has a fifteen year maximum sentence. The state attorney knew the crash wasn’t Roy’s fault, so she said, “Look, if you want to go to trial and win, I don’t care. I’ll put on a case. If the jury finds you’re not at fault, so be it.” The detective who investigated the case said about the same—he didn’t care if it went to trial. The detective played golf with Stinger so he didn’t “have it out for Roy,” unlike some cases. Roy had to consider this: if he went to trial and lost, he could end up getting the maximum sentence: thirty years in prison. If he pled guilty, he could get four years, which was the minimum.

Here’s the kicker: the state changed the wording of the law for DUI manslaughter from “caused the accident” to “caused and  or contributed to the crash.” What the heck does that mean?

Here is an example: I am driving down the road, minding my own business, but I’m over the legal limit. (Let me stop and say one word here: “Uber.”)

Someone traveling in the opposite direction while distracted by a cell phone comes into my lane and we collide head on. If someone in the other car dies, I can go to prison for fifteen years, even though I did not cause the crash. You might ponder, That’s not fair. Well, the State of Florida would respond, “You contributed to the crash by being on the road.” Bummer, right!

The legal limit for blood alcohol level in Florida is .08. If you’ve had three beers, you’re probably over the legal limit. Now, I could probably drive from here to Hawaii on three beers, but that’s not the point. You should not drink and drive, that goes without saying, but many people don’t realize they might actually be over the legal limit even when they aren’t showing any signs of being impaired.

Just be aware: according to the law, it’s not only your driving you have to worry about, it’s also anyone else who might be driving recklessly, or just not paying attention to the road. Trust me, it’s not worth the risk. Just Uber.

Anyway, the judge told Roy, “Look. You could plead guilty, and be out before the next president is elected, or you could go to trial, possibly lose, and there could be four or more presidents elected to office before you get out.”

Roy said, “Well, I am a gambler… but I don’t gamble like that.”

He took the plea, and went to prison for four years.

But there’s more to this story…

The night of the accident, police and EMS showed up at the scene.

The officer at the scene told the EMS firefighter/paramedic,
“I want you to draw Mr. Margison’s blood.”

That’s standard at crash scenes like this one. They use the blood to determine if the person had any drugs or alcohol in his/her system. Back then, you didn’t need to consent for a blood draw; they could just take it. Since then, the law has been changed to require consent, or a court order. But in any case, Roy consented, so it wouldn’t have mattered.

The paramedic drew Roy’s blood, and gave it to the officer.

Now, when blood is drawn at a crash like this one, both the deputy and the paramedic have to watch the blood draw, then it immediately goes into a box which is sealed and signed by both witnesses. Chain of custody is a big deal.

Well, in this case, the officer apparently insisted that the box didn’t need to be sealed. He left with the blood… and didn’t turn it in for several hours. That then became a big issue with chain of custody: What did the cop do with that blood from the time it was taken from Roy, until the time he turned it in? We filed a motion to suppress the blood as evidence, based on those chain of custody issues. Also, we ended up deposing the paramedic from Hillsborough County Fire Rescue who had drawn the blood.

We found out the cop had gone to the paramedic, to try to get him to lie about what happened. Apparently, the cop had shown up at the fire station more than an hour after he’d taken the blood from the scene, and had asked the paramedic to sign and seal it after the fact.

At first, the paramedic refused. That’s significant. Eventually, the paramedic signed the seal of the blood collection kit, but only because he was asked to by the law enforcement officers. He stated that he did so under protest, because he did not know where the blood had been, and believed the blood should have been sealed and signed at the scene of the accident. When he reported what happened to his captain, the captain told him to file an incident report with headquarters. (You can see some of this information in the images I’ve included from the deposition and our motion to suppress, below. These are all public record, but for the purposes of this book, I’ve redacted the names.)