It appears that Oprah Winfrey’s message against no cellphone or texting while driving fell on deaf ears in the case of celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan. And he is apparently dead now because of it.
Ryan, a Beverly Hills doctor with patients like model Janice Dickinson, Heidi Montag and Gene Simmons of Kiss, was killed last Monday. He drove his Jeep Wrangler off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu shortly after posting Twitter updates on his dog, and he was possibly also texting right before the crash.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-ryan18-m,0,1480290.story
Those are exactly the activities that distract drivers and cause accidents, and it appears that this may have been the case with Ryan.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Ryan posted a photo of his border collie on Twitter Monday at 4:10 p.m. and 20 minutes later, his Jeep veered off the highway and down an embankment, landing on its roof. The accident was reported 4:33 p.m., The Times said.
Ironically, his dog Jill wasn’t killed in the crash.
Ryan’s former girlfriend, Charmaine Blake, initially told People magazine that the plastic surgeon was texting and then accidently drove off the cliff. She later revised her statement, claiming she had been told by someone that Ryan had been texting while driving.
Oprah doesn’t call vehicles “No Phone Zones” for nothing.
I hope we discover that Ryan didn’t cause his own death by being distracted by tweeting or texting while driving. But if he was, that should be a pretty major teaching moment for America.