Stephanie Latoya Grissom of Columbia was issued two tickets and fined $310 for speeding and negligent driving.
"I don't understand how a man can get 90 days in jail for not cleaning up his yard," Tracy said, "and you can kill someone with your car, and all you get is a ticket and fines."
It isn't illegal in Maryland to talk on a cell phone while driving. It isn't manslaughter when you kill someone while doing so. The Wheelers think it ought to be.
So does Maryland Sen. Mike Lenett, the Montgomery County Democrat who has proposed legislation that would make it illegal to talk or text on a cell phone while driving.
He had one of his twin sons in his arms and the other by the hand and was about to cross a one-way street when a woman on a cell phone sped around the corner and went the wrong way down the street.
"I grabbed my son and pulled him back. She never even saw us."
Legislators have tried for a decade to pass some kind of distracted-driving law, but the concept was too hard to define for any bill to gain much traction. Lenett's bill focuses on the use of hand-held devices and text messaging, and it is the only proposal to prohibit both, he said.
For years, cell phone companies lined up against such prohibitions, but they have retreated this year.
"They know they are on the wrong side of this issue," Lenett said.
Some lawmakers have objected that this represents too much intrusion by government. "We are only fighting legislators at this point," Lenett said. The bill has the support of the Maryland State Police and the highway safety division of the Maryland Department of Transportation.
If the legislature can pass a ban on talking and texting while driving, Lenett said, Gov. Martin O'Malley has assured him he will sign it.
"The governor gets it," Lenett said. "I know there are no statistics to record the real danger here, but I don't need a study to tell me that I could have lost my son. I believe we all know, deep down inside, that we are not safe on the road when drivers have one hand on a cell phone and the other on the wheel."
Tracy and Scott had planned to view the video of their wedding on a Hawaiian beach for the first time on their first anniversary. Two months to the day after Scott was hit, Tracy watched it without him.
"I thought we had our whole lives," she said while sitting in the kitchen of her in-laws' home. She still lives in the house she and Scott purchased less than a mile away.
"I keep thinking he will walk in the door," said his mother, Janet, who rarely cooks anymore. "I keep thinking he will walk in the door and ask me what I made for him to eat."
