After more than a year of court proceedings, the hit-and-run driver who struck 41-year-old Tanya Turman in March of 2015 will be sentenced June 9.
Turman died of her injuries 23 days after the collision, her mother, Pamela Grant, told the Recorder.
In the time since her daughter’s death, Grant has organized a group called Silent Angels to offer support to other hit-and-run victims and their families. Grant said the idea for the group started while she was still at her daughter’s hospital bedside.
“When I was at the hospital with Tanya, I was just thinking, what can I do? After I spent time at the hospital and after I was on the news, people started recognizing me. I would walk down the hall of the hospital and people would just be so nice.”
Grant said strangers gave her money and told her to get herself something to eat, and some even asked if they could pray with her.
“I was thinking one day, everybody’s been so good to me. What can I do to help other people? I just decided to form this support group, because I know how hard it was for me every day for 23 days being up there and seeing my daughter laying there.”
Silent Angels started with Grant and one other woman but now includes a few families. The group has hosted a public prayer vigil, and a benefit dinner was held in April to raise funds and officially launch the organization.
Next on Grant’s list: Targeting Indiana’s laws.
“The next thing I’m trying to do is to get people to sign petitions to change the law for the hit-and-run victims,” Grant said, citing what she considers lax punishment for people who flee the scene after hitting someone.
“Innocent people are losing their lives, and then when they find the person who does it, there’s really no punishment for it,” she said. “A lot of these people have been just getting probation or home detention, and that’s what I was offered, too. But I was not going to accept that. We’re talking about a person’s life.”
Grant said the man who hit her daughter turned himself in 11 days after the collision, when it was too late to do any drug or alcohol screening. The driver agreed to plead guilty, but Grant and her other daughter were not on board with the sentence suggested. Grant said they talked it over and ended up asking for one year of jail time and one year of probation, which the prosecutor accepted.
“I just wanted something to be done. I knew it wasn’t going to be a lot of time, but something is better than nothing,” she said.
Grant said she’s planning a meeting with representatives of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) and the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office to learn more about Indiana’s current hit-and-run statutes and discuss possible changes.
Though Grant said the idea for Silent Angels came from her desire to help others, starting the group has been a big comfort to her, too.
“Just being around other people in the same predicament that I’m in, it helps a lot. I had support at the hospital, and I met a lot of people, but they were people who had gotten shot or stabbed. It was different,” she said. “I still think about my daughter a lot. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. (It helps) just knowing that I can call somebody else if I need to talk to somebody.”
Grant said the next Silent Angels gathering will be a meeting in July at a local library, but the specific details are still being worked out. For anyone who wants to reach out to the group for support, Grant said she can be reached on Facebook through her page or her daughter’s page, or people can email her at pjgrant8@yahoo.com.
