AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon teamed with award-winning director Werner Herzog to create a film that shows the real-life impact of texting while driving. The film is 34 minutes and tells 4 different stories by the victims, their families, and the drivers who caused the car collisions because they were texting. Their stories demonstrate how something so insignificant as a text message, that can easily wait, can take away so much from the victim, their families, and the drivers who caused the collision.

The film starts by providing statistics on the number of accidents caused each year by texting drivers: more than 100,000.

The first story, called “X Man,” is about young boy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, named Xzavier, who is now paralyzed from the diaphragm down, is in a wheelchair, and needs a ventilator to breath, because he was hit while crossing the street by a texting driver who was speeding in a school zone and ran a stop sign. His mother’s emotional telling of her once energetic son, who loved the Green Bay Packers, and how she dreamed before the collision of cheering “X” while she watched him play sports was gone, and how she worries while listening to her son’s ventilator at night, and she can’t just tell her son to go out and play in the yard, is moving to say the least.

The second story, “A Letter from Martin” interviews Chandler Gerber of Bluffton, Indiana,  who hit an Amish family in their horse drawn buggy with his minivan,  and killed three boys who were 3, 5, and 17 years old, while texting back and forth with his wife. The letter was from the boys’  father to Mr. Gerber, expressing his wish that he had spent more time with his children. Chandler wished for nothing more than the ability to take that moment back and not text and drive.

The third story, “Our Sister Debbie,” is told by Debbei’s brother and sister, and how she and her dog were getting the mail when they were hit by a driver who was texting. Their story tells of her active life before the collision traveling the world, and that after, she can’t even go in her front yard because her injuries which cost over $1,000,000 in medical bills have left her with poor eyesight, poor verbal skills, a brain injury, and her arms and legs don’t work. Her life was changed forever, her dog who was “her best friend” was killed, and the texting driver only spent 30 days in jail, 5 months of house arrest, 500 hours of community service, and her insurance paid $50,000. The unfairness of what it has done to their sister, over a text, is clear in the victim’s bother’s and sister’s emotional telling of theirs and their sister’s story.

The fourth story, “Reaching for the Stars,” is told from the perspective of the victim’s daughter, the texting driver, and a third driver involved in the collision, in Logan, Utah. It starts with Megan Odell, who retells the times she and her father star gazed through telescopes and watch meteor showers together. The texting driver, who appears very remorseful and upset, crossed the center line while texting, causing the victims’ car to spin into the path of an oncoming pickup truck, which crush the car and killed the two occupants and severely injured the driver of the pickup truck. The texting driver retells how selfish he was  that he decided to text while driving and how doing so, he made a choice that texting was more important than the lives of the two men in the car he hit and killed. The daughter retold the night terrors she now experienced about her father’s car accident even though she was not there. The driver of the pickup truck, who called himself a cowboy who loved the mountains, could no longer horseshoe because the herniated disks in his back and his knee injuries from the collision.  Seven years after the collision the emotions still seem raw for all involved.

Things happen quickly while you are driving, things that will change your life forever, things more important than what you have to say in a text, it can wait. Put your phone away and focus on the road.

You can watch the entire film at itcanwait.com and take the pledge to not text and drive.