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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah lawmaker is trying to toughen the state's seat belt laws this year, hoping anybody who isn’t wearing a seat belt can be pulled over and cited for that alone.
It's an effort that has failed several times before, but he's pointing to one story he hopes will change a lot of minds.
Right now, wearing a seat belt is the law.
But police can't pull you over if you're an adult and you're not wearing one, unless you're doing something else wrong.
Rep. Lee Perry wants to make no seat belt a primary offense, and a local family believes two lives would have been saved if the law were already in place.
A rollover that took two young lives in June 2013 is still painful for Melissa Brown, whose daughter is one of those killed.
“You look at the truck, and I mean, it was a survivable crash,” Brown said.
Brown’s daughter Mandi was left in a coma for days before she died.
“She was beautiful,” Brown said. “I mean, she was fun. I just cried. It was like, ‘that was not my daughter.’ She was so swollen, she was so bruised. She was cut.”
Many of those were preventable injuries, Brown says, because her daughter wasn't wearing a seat belt.
She always had before.
What this would do is it would cause people to go, 'do I want the possibility of being stopped by law enforcement and getting a ticket?' And it would cause people to wear seat belts.
–Rep. Lee Perry
Brown is taking what she has left of Mandi, pictures, memories and love, and channeling it into advocacy.
“If it would have been a primary law, they would have had their belts on that day,” Brown said. “Because highway patrol could have pulled them over and given them a ticket.”
She's a driving force behind Perry's bill to make no seat belt a primary offense.
Perry said Brown’s death became even more personal for him.
“I’m passionate about it anyway, but I couldn’t tell them ‘no’ after seeing what I saw,” Perry said.
Perry responded to the deadly crash in his other job as a Highway Patrol lieutenant.
And he said no-seat-belt deaths simply happen too often.
“What this would do is it would cause people to go, ‘do I want the possibility of being stopped by law enforcement and getting a ticket,” Perry said. “And it would cause people to wear seat belts.”
Perry has tried before and failed. Brown hopes this year will be different.
“I just really want to see it get passed so it can save lives and prevent people from going through what we go through every single day,” Brown said. “It’s hard.”
Perry is pointing to stats that show 80 percent of people in Utah wear seat belts.
He said in states where not wearing a belt is a primary offense, the rates are 10 to 12 percent higher.
He believes a change in the law could save 35 to 40 lives per year.
