Lilly Glaubach Act introduced to help solve hit and runs
In 2022, 13-year-old Lilly Glaubach was riding her bike home from school in Sarasota County when she was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The driver took his car to an auto body shop in Tampa and told them a tree fell on it.
“The car had our daughter’s blood and her hair in it. But unfortunately, this repair shop was told a tree fell on it,” Paul Alexander, Lilly’s step-dad, told ABC-7.
At the time of the crash, another driver saw the damaged vehicle and took a picture of it and sent it to police. When police found the car, they arrested the owner, then 66-year-old David Chang. He is now serving a 15-year jail sentence.
Sen. Joe Gruters, R- Sarasota, introduced the Lilly Glaubach Bill, which would require repair shops to ask the owner of a vehicle damaged in a collision to provide a written crash report from police before a written estimate is prepared.
If the owner does not provide a crash report, the repair shop would be required to provide its own report to local law enforcement within 24 hours. Information in those reports would contain:I
- The name and address of the repair shop.
- The vehicle VIN, year, license tag number, make, model, and color of the damaged vehicle and the name, phone number, physical description, and address of the owner of the vehicle or the person in possession of the vehicle.
- A description of the damage.
“We’re requiring that autobody shops and anybody who does repairs, on anything that’s over $5,000, that they would have to have a crash report or an accident report before any work was done,” Gruters, told ABC 7.
Sen. Gruters said he’s pushing for lawmakers to pass the Lilly Glaubach Act because most of the time, cases like hers go unsolved.
See Florida Motor Vehicle Crash Data here.