Special to WROY/WRUL News
By BETH HUNDSDORFER
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]
For a moment, Illinois State Trooper Alex Womack was flying, tumbling in mid-air, alternately seeing sky then ground.
He doesn’t remember hitting the road.
He regained consciousness and realized he had been hit by a truck and was lying in the middle of a darkened interstate near East St. Louis, unable to move with cars traveling 70 mph headed toward him. He remembers seeing the oncoming headlights.
“I was able to raise my one arm off the ground,” Womack said.
An oncoming driver saw his upraised arm in his headlights and slammed on the brakes, managing to stop just feet away. That shaken driver pulled the injured trooper off the roadway to safety.
Womack had just become the 19th of 26 Illinois state troopers involved in a Scott’s Law crash in 2019 — a year when two troopers were killed and a dozen, including Womack, were injured. Those crashes spurred legislative changes and heightened public awareness campaigns.
Scott’s Law, also known as the Move Over Law, requires that all vehicles move over, if possible, or slow down when passing a stopped or disabled emergency vehicle with its flashing lights on. It was passed in 2001. Since 2019, there have been
In 2024, there were more crashes than in the past five years — 27 in all — including a fatal collision that killed Trooper Clay Carns, an 11-year veteran and father of two. Carns died Dec. 23, 2024, after he was struck while clearing debris from the highway after a crash on Interstate 55 near Channahon.
The crash that killed Carns happened 24 years to the day after Chicago Fire Department Lt. Scott Gillen died after he was struck by a passing car at an accident scene. The legislation that later became known as Scott’s Law was named for Gillen.
The 2019 deaths of two troopers in an eight-week period once again put the Move Over Law in the spotlight.
On Jan. 12, 2019, Trooper Christopher Lambert died after a crash on Interstate 294 in Cook County. On March 28, 2019, Trooper Brooke Jones Story died in crash on U.S. 20 in Stephenson County.
One of Brendan Kelly’s first duties as the newly appointed director of the Illinois State Police was delivering the eulogy at Jones Story’s funeral.
Since then, one of Kelly’s missions has been to educate the public on the Move Over Law, including enforcement details to ticket violators and campaigns to educate drivers. In 2019, ISP issued nearly 6,300 citations for violating the Move Over Law — which was nearly 5,300 more than the combined totals of the two previous years.
“We will continue to hammer home this message as long as it takes because this is a matter of life and death for our officers and for the safety of the public,” Kelly said.
A person who violates the Move Over Law now faces a minimum fine of $250 up to a maximum of $10,000 for a first offense. If the violation results in injury to another person, the violator’s driver’s license will be suspended for up to two years.
In the wake of the 2019 deaths, Gov. JB Pritzker formed a task force that recommended changes in the law and stiffer penalties for violators, improvements in protective equipment and lighting for trooper, and public awareness campaigns.
Three days after the task force released its first report, there was another crash.
On Feb. 15, 2021, Trooper Brian Frank, with his marked squad car’s emergency lights activated, stopped in the left lane of Interstate 55 northbound near Route 30 near Joliet to block traffic for a crash that had just occurred. While still inside his squad car, a black Cadillac struck the rear of Trooper Frank’s squad car, leaving him with serious brain injuries.
Lauren Frank, Trooper Frank’s wife, became an advocate for the Move Over Law, including advocating for a bill on Aug. 12, 2021, that strengthened the penalties against violators.
Brian Frank continues to recover from his catastrophic brain injury and remains in a “minimally conscious state.”
Brian Angel Casillas, the driver who hit Frank, received a 15-month prison sentence.
The Move Over Law protections were further expanded this year. Beginning on Jan. 1, drivers must change lanes, reduce speed, or stop when approaching or passing any emergency vehicle, including police, sheriff, ambulances and maintenance vehicles, with the flashing lights activated. Drivers are also required to yield the right-of-way to any authorized vehicle or pedestrian actually engaged in work on a highway or a construction zone.
ISP is also employing technology to reduce Scott’s Law crashes. Late last year, the agency announced a partnership with HAAS Alert — a company that provides safety alerts to drivers, notifying them of ISP activity in the road ahead and urging them to slow down and move over. HAAS provides real-time GPS-based traffic information in Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Mercedes-Benz, RAM and Volkswagen vehicles.
ISP provides information about crashes, traffic stops, motorist assists or debris on the roadway, which is then pushed out to in-vehicle GPS systems. As drivers approach the GPS location of the trooper, they will see a police icon and receive an alert to slow down and move over.
ISP also partnered with Google to provide notifications in Google and Waze Maps to expand the alerts on their platforms.
So far this year, there have been four crashes in Illinois, injuring three troopers.
Womack, the trooper who was struck in March 2019, sustained a broken femur, humorous, compressed discs in his vertebrae. He underwent two surgeries and months of physical therapy. He didn’t return to full work duties for more than a year, but he said he was thankful to be alive.
“By the grace of God, I was saved. It just wasn’t my time to go,” Womack said.
Kyamran B. Makharadze, 26, the truck driver who hit Womack, was charged with aggravated driving under the influence and aggravated reckless driving. He pleaded guilty in 2023 and received a year in prison.
Womack returned to work after months of recovery. Today, he said when he pulls over drivers for violating the Move Over Law, he tells them what happened to him.
“I hope it’s a lesson,” Womack said. “I work on the side of the road. That’s my office. And, at the end of the day, I just want to go home.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
