Perhaps if Erin Leas had been the daughter of a phone company executive when she died in a car accident due to cell phone distractions, Texas laws might change. Instead, phone companies exert influence on your elected legislators to deny reform and maintain huge profits.

You may be saying to yourself, “I talk on my cell phone while driving, and I haven’t had a traffic accident yet, and I don’t want to quit.” But if Erin had been your daughter, you might sing a different tune.

A 16-year-old cheerleader in San Antonio, Erin lost everything due to a cell phone accident. One day in 2001 she called her mom as she got into her car to head home. Her mother said she loved her and urged her to be safe, starting with turning off her cell phone.

Erin didn’t, and when her boyfriend called and she reached for her phone, she lost control of her car, slammed into a tree, and died.

When such a tragedy doesn’t hurt you personally, it’s easier to see it as a statistic. But even if someone in your family hasn’t succumbed, many such as Erin have. At least 126 Texas sons and daughters have died — and hundreds more have been injured — in over 13,000 car accidents in the past four years caused by cell phone distractions, reports the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Such numbers aren’t an isolated aberration or a statistical anomaly. They’re carnage.

As a result, victims’ families are pushing for reform in Austin. But phone companies have beaten them to it, having made heavy cash contributions to silence reforms for years.

How much cash? Glad you asked. According to the Houston Chronicle, AT&T’s political action committee gave $1 million-plus to Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and various legislative candidates and legislators in the 2007-08 election cycle. Verizon and Sprint Nextel also made pay-outs.

Meanwhile, a proposed law restricting cell phone use in drivers never got out of committee. You do the math.

That means talky Texans continue to inflict death and serious injuries on others — not just themselves — because they’re disengaged from their immediate and vital task of operating a motor vehicle. And all they had to do to prevent such tragedies was hang up and drive.

One recent cell phone accident victim was Harris County Deputy Constable Jason Norling, a man who devoted his life to public safety. While writing out a ticket on the shoulder of the Westpark Tollway, Norling was hit and killed by a distracted driver who was making a cell phone call.

His death came shortly after legislators in Austin squashed proposed bills which would have protected him.

“The communications companies have really come out strongly against my bills in the past,” the Chronicle quotes Rep. Jose Menendez of San Antonio. Of course, money talks, and as Menendez notes, Texas has a whopping 18 million wireless subscribers.

At least we’re aware of wireless companies’ priorities: their own enormous profits, not the greater good and public safety. In a fight, you want to know precisely where your opponent stands. And in this case, it’s not on a busy tollway while serving the public. It’s hiding behind the cash contributions of political action committees.

Menendez is one of a few brave legislative voices seeking reform and car accident help in a world of widespread  permissiveness toward driver cell phone use. But before you panic, consider this: Reform wouldn’t have to mean a complete ban on all cell phone use by all drivers at all times in all vehicles.

Rather, new laws could limit drivers’ cell phone use by requiring hands-free devices, by restricting cell phone use in accident-prone teen drivers, by banning texting while driving by anyone, and by restricting cell phone use by all drivers in school zones.

Such laws wouldn’t be needed if people could be relied upon to exercise common sense. As Erin’s mother, Cyndi Leas, tells the Chronicle, “Turn your cell phone off when you go out to your car. That call can wait. It isn’t that important. It surely isn’t worth your life or someone else’s life.”

That’s not just common sense — it’s wisdom. Yet your state government has resisted advancing such protections, thanks to the cash influence of phone companies and the politicians who sell out to them.

If you’ve had enough, contact your legislator and demand the kind of sensible reforms which are on the books already in many other states. And if you or a loved one has suffered from another driver’s cell phone distractions, consider another car accident option: alert a cell phone accidents lawyer with Jim S. Adler & Associates, who can fight for your rights and hold inattentive drivers accountable.

Meanwhile, Texans will continue to die and be injured by the most pervasive driver distraction in America today: cell phone calling and texting while behind the wheel.

Erin’s mother painfully knows the toll taken by such unwise — and legally tolerated — indulgence.

“If she had both her hands on the steering wheel,” says Cyndi Leas, “she would probably have been alive.”

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