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David Chang drove almost 80 miles to an auto-body shop in Tampa after slamming into a 13-year-old girl bicycling home from Pine View School in 2022, leaving her lying in the roadway.
His vision was obscured by fissures in his windshield — wind most likely whistled through the cracks from the impact of the crash.
Chang later returned home on the same road where hours earlier he’d hit Lilly Glaubach. He spent one more night with his wife and daughter before police knocked on his door after a Good Samaritan saw the damaged car, snapped a photograph and alerted police.
More than two years after the hit-and-run that took Glaubach’s life, Chang is serving a 15-year sentence, and a Florida senator is again pushing for a bill that would help law enforcement with hit-and-run investigations.
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Sen. Joe Gruters filed Senate Bill 92, also known as the Lilly Glaubach Act, in December. The bill would require auto repair shops to collect and submit crash reports before repairing cars.
“For people to shirk their responsibility and run away, it drains the entire system. It’s not fair,” Gruters said. “To me, this is a simple, common-sense solution that everybody can get behind, and trying to block or slow down a bill like this, to me, is inexcusable.”
The bill, if passed, would require auto body shops to ask vehicle owners that came in with damage due to a collision to provide a written crash report from police before giving a written estimate. If the driver doesn’t have a report, the repair shop would have to complete its own report, which would then be available to law enforcement within 24 hours.
Gruters filed a similar bill in 2023, but it died in the Commerce and Tourism Committee in March 2024.
It is only the second piece of legislation in 10 years that has been aimed at those who flee the scene of a crash.
In 2014, former Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed into law the Aaron Cohen Life Protection Act which increased the minimum mandatory sentence for those found guilty of fleeing a crash involving death from a year to 4 years.
A family photo shows Lilly Glaubach with a butterfly resting on her hand after she rescued it from the lanai at her home in Osprey.
During an interview with the Herald-Tribune, Gruters said while the bill won’t catch everybody who decides to flee after a crash, it could help bring closure to more families in a state that annually sees more than 103,000 hit-and-run crashes.
As of Feb. 27, there have been 97,702 hit-and-run crashes, including 242 deaths from hit-and-run crashes, according to the Florida Department of Motor Vehicle and Highway Safety’s crash dashboard.
In 2023, there were 104,273 hit-and-run crashes in Florida, a decrease of less than 1% from 2022, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.
Larry Coggins, regional executive director with Mothers Against Drunk Driving or MADD, is excited about the bill being talked about and filed again. As part of the national organization’s mission of ending drunk driving, the bill is a step toward bringing justice to loved ones who have lost someone to a crash.
“We know people flee crashes because they’re drunk. We know that,” Coggins said. “So, we are a big proponent and supporter of this legislation.”
Coggins acknowledged those who oppose the bill will most likely argue it will place a tremendous burden on auto body shops or create an extra step that takes more time, but he disagrees.
He feels that an overwhelming amount of time, drivers who come into auto body shops already have an insurance claim, crash report or a case number in hand. The bill would simply ensure due diligence for auto body shops to check with local law enforcement agencies on the small number of people who come in and claim they hit a dog, mailbox, tree or some other object and don’t have any proof.
The bill has been likened to current pawn shop legislation. Under Florida law, anytime an item is sold or pawned at a pawn shop, the shop is required to enter that item into a statewide database that law enforcement can access.
The same would happen if the bill was passed.
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The bill states that if estimated repairs to a car that was brought in cost $5,000 or more, the shop would require the driver to provide a written crash report. If a report is not provided, the shop will then prepare an accident or collision repair work transaction form which includes the name and address of the auto repair shop, a description of the vehicle being repaired, and detailed description of the damage.
The shop would then need to submit the form to a local law enforcement agency on a daily basis and keep a copy of each form for at least a year, according to the bill.
Glaubach’s mother and stepfather, Sarah and Paul Alexander, are hopeful that the bill will get through the Legislature so as to prevent other families going through the uncertainty they lived through while Lilly was in the hospital fighting for her life and they had no idea who had run into her.
“It means a lot that Lilly didn’t die in vain,” Paul Alexander said. “That hopefully she can still help others. That’s kind of always who she was. … (She) was always willing to help other people whether it was standing up to friends saying mean things, or whether it was her just reaching out to the new people at a school. She was always that person, and it means the world that she may still get to do that.”
Recent news coverage of another Sarasota hit-and-run that killed two children and left their 29-year-old mother in a coma has brought up a lot of feelings for Sarah Alexander and her family. She said that the incident reinforces the need for the bill to be passed.
She added that just talking with people in the community seems to reveal that almost everyone has had a brush with a hit-and-run or knows someone who has had a hit-and-run happen to them.
"I'm just so thankful and really humbled that people still think about Lilly and think about, you know, what happened," Sarah Alexander said. "And I just, obviously, every time I do an interview like this, or think about this, it's hard. It's hard to relive things, but I do think that it's helpful ... it can be helpful to other families. I know that's what she would have wanted."
Gabriela Szymanowska covers the legal system for the Herald-Tribune in partnership with Report for America. You can support her work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America. Contact Gabriela Szymanowska at gszymanowska@gannett.com, or on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: 'Lilly Glaubach Act' could help law enforcement solve more hit-and-runs
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