Support builds for hands-free cellphone law
Mom: Daughter’s death was ‘totally preventable’
Nearly a year after their daughter’s death, Anna and Richard Levitan met with the young man who had been texting when he struck and killed their oldest, Merritt, while she was bicycling across the country.
The grieving parents met with the driver, Teagan Ross Martin, inside Boston’s Trinity Church, where their daughter’s memorial services were held. Somehow, they found it in their hearts to forgive him.
“We pray him well and hope that he’s rebuilding his life,” Anna Levitan told me yesterday. “He was completely broken by it. So what good would it have been for us to throw him in jail? That’s not going to bring Merritt back.”
While the couple showed mercy to Martin, and the charges against him were reduced, they’ve made it their mission to prevent what happened to their daughter from happening to anyone else.
Yesterday, Anna and Richard Levitan returned to Boston and stood on the State House steps calling on lawmakers to pass proposed hands-free cellphone legislation in Massachusetts, which would make it against the law for people to hold cellphones while driving.
“She was so loving and present and aware, and I know Merritt would be so supportive of this,” Anna Levitan said after the rally. “This would be her type of activism. She was completely community driven and civic-minded. I know she’s happy about this right now.”
Merritt, 18, had just graduated from Milton Academy. She was struck by Martin, then 21, on July 2, 2013, while riding her bike on a rural road in Arkansas, one of 13 riders taking part in a 3,000 mile trek from South Carolina to Santa Monica, Calif.
“You never, ever, ever in a summer, in a July, want to go to the funeral of your daughter,” Anna Levitan told the crowd. “The young driver who struck our beautiful, vivacious and brilliant 18-year-old daughter, and I mean brilliant, was texting four seconds before the crash.”
“Totally preventable,” Anna Levitan added. “It wasn’t against the law.”
Merritt suffered traumatic brain injuries and was flown by a medical helicopter to Memphis, Tenn., her mother said. Anna Levitan and her husband and their family flew to be with Merritt during “her last breaths on this earth.”
“She was held by her younger brother and sister, Hunter and Joe,” Anna Levitan said. “No one else should go through what we’ve gone through.”
The Levitans lived in the Back Bay and Milton but moved back to Anna Levitan’s home state of Georgia after Merritt’s death. The couple championed the handsfree bill that passed earlier this month in Georgia. Sixteen states have the law. But the bill here is languishing in the House and has to be taken up by the end of July. Every minute of every day, Anna Levitan thinks of her daughter. “She gives us the strength,” Anna Levitan said, “to do everything we do.”