The Witness

Sofia was waiting for a streetcar on Queen Street, in Toronto, when she heard the sound of metal against metal. It was not a loud crash, more like a heavy door being closed, but everyone at the stop turned around. At the traffic lights, a silver car had driven into the back of a white delivery van. Nobody was hurt. Both drivers got out, looked at the damage and started arguing.

Sofia had come to Toronto from Caracas eight months earlier to study engineering, and she was naturally curious. She did not mean to listen, but the two men were standing only a few meters away and they were not speaking quietly. The driver of the van, a large man in a company jacket, was holding his neck and shouting. The driver of the silver car, a young man in a suit, kept looking at his phone, which was still in his hand.

Ten minutes later a police car arrived. One officer spoke to the drivers while the other, a woman with a calm voice, came over to the streetcar stop and asked if anyone had seen what happened. Everyone else suddenly found something interesting to look at on the ground. Sofia hesitated. Her friend Camila had once advised her never to get involved in anything that might lead to the police. But Sofia had seen it, and she had heard it. She raised her hand.

The officer, whose name was Constable Wright, took her to the side of the road and opened her notebook. Before they started, she warned Sofia to tell her only what she had actually seen and heard, not what she thought had probably happened. "People often fill in the gaps without realizing it," she explained. "That's normal, but it isn't helpful." Sofia nodded and took a deep breath.

She explained that the van had stopped at a red light and that the silver car had hit it from behind a few seconds later. The officer asked whether the van had braked suddenly. Sofia said that she did not think so, because the light had already been red for a while. She was careful to add that she had been looking at the van, not at the light, so she could not be completely sure.

Then the officer asked what the drivers had said to each other. This was the difficult part. Sofia closed her eyes and tried to remember the exact words. The van driver, she said, had accused the other man of not looking at the road. The young man had denied it at first. He had claimed that the van had stopped for no reason and that he had had no time to react. But a minute later, when the van driver threatened to call his company's lawyer, the young man had said something different.

"What did he say, exactly?" asked Constable Wright. Sofia thought for a moment. She said that the young man had apologized and told the van driver that he had been reading a message, but only for a second. Then he had offered to pay for the damage himself if the van driver agreed not to call the police. So the young man had admitted reading a message while driving, the officer said, writing it down. Sofia confirmed that he had. She also mentioned, because it seemed fair, that the van driver had been holding his neck but had refused to see a doctor when a passer-by suggested it.

When the officer spoke to the young man again, he denied having said anything about a message. Then Constable Wright asked to see his phone. A message from a friend had arrived thirty seconds before the time of the accident, and it had been opened. The young man stopped arguing. He admitted that he had been distracted and agreed that the damage was his responsibility.

Constable Wright thanked Sofia and gave her a card in case she remembered anything else. Before she left, the officer told her that witnesses like her were rarer than people thought. "Most people remember what they expected to see," she said. "You remembered what happened."

That evening, Sofia called Camila and told her the whole story. Camila listened in silence and then admitted that maybe her advice had not been very good. Sofia said she would think about it. Then she reminded Camila, very politely, never to read her messages while driving.