Smartphones are killing Americans, but nobody's counting fatalities

In 2015, there were 32,166 fatal car crashes on US roads

Jennifer Smith doesn’t like the term ‘accident.’ It implies too much chance and too little culpability.

A ‘crash’ killed her mother in 2008, she insists, when her car was broadsided by another vehicle while on her way to pick up cat food. The other driver, a 20-year-old college student, ran a red light while talking on his mobile phone, a distraction that he immediately admitted and cited as the catalyst of the fatal event. 

“He was remorseful,” Smith, now 43, said. “He never changed his story.”

Yet in federal records, the death isn’t attributed to distraction or mobile-phone use. It’s