A man whose Tesla Model 3 was allegedly in self-driving mode when it crashed into a home near Houston and killed a 76-year-old woman inside recently has been jailed on a count of manslaughter.
Michael Butler’s arrest in the 19 June death of Martha Avila was announced late on Wednesday in a Facebook post by the sheriff of Harris county, Texas, Ed Gonzalez.
Butler, 44, remained in the custody of Gonzalez’s office as of Friday morning in lieu of $150,000 bail, jail records showed. He had a court hearing tentatively scheduled for 6 July.
His arrest came amid a case that has drawn federal investigators’ scrutiny as well as a wrongful death lawsuit from Avila’s family.
Butler was traveling in his Tesla at about 8pm local time in the Houston suburb of Katy when the car allegedly[1] plowed through the front wall of Avila’s home, fatally pinning her.
Investigators said Butler, who was injured in the wreck, showed no signs of intoxication and was cooperating with investigators. He allegedly told sheriff’s deputies that he was using self-driving technology with which the car was equipped, but it has not been clear what – if any – role it played in the deadly crash.
The is a whole lot of words for a story that never answers the fundamental question raised: “What evidence led to Butler’s arrest?”
I have no reason to question the validity of the arrest, but a nut graf would be really useful here. Say, the actual text of the Facebook announcement[2] laying out why the guy is in jail. Something as simple as:
In a statement posted online, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said that investigators had determined the Autopilot feature had been deactivated at the time of the crash.
We don’t need the cop jargon, but the reader deserves something better than The Guardian posting a story that admits “Butler was arrested, and we have no idea why.”
Somehow, The Verge got hold of the probable-cause affidavit[3], which lays out some pretty damning determinations.
And yes, I just learned about footnote formatting[4].
this portion of the story is not in dispute ↩︎
once again, friendly reminder that posting on Facebook is necessarily exclusionary ↩︎
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28405676-texas-v-michael-butlerpdf/ ↩︎
I’m drunk with power! ↩︎
I suppose that the most likely scenario is that the evidence was something that Tesla provided to the police. Whether or not it was tampered with is an open question though. Teslas are equipped with a gorzillion cameras, but also Tesla has access to deep fake technology. Tesla says that the guy manually deactivated autopilot then slammed the accelerator and drove right into a house. But he wasn’t intoxicated and it’s not clear why he would intentionally do such a thing. It wasn’t late enough that it was likely to be the guy simply falling asleep at the wheel.
Anyway, it would be very interesting if Tesla fabricated the driver turning off autopilot intentionally to save face/dodge consequences, but I don’t know how likely that would be.
