The accident that started it all happened on the evening of Oct. 2, 1997, in the northwest Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. A semi-end dump truck operator thought she could haul more loads of dirt per hour by running red lights at a quiet county road intersection. Each time she took the risk, her probability for a crash compounded.

At about 11:00 that night, her luck ran out. Plowing through the intersection at full speed, the dump truck slammed into the side of a Geo Metro subcompact, pushing the car down the road sideways 160 ft and killing its driver, a 21-year-old woman who was five months pregnant.