NC man was caught driving on a revoked license 28 times. Then he killed my husband.
In July 2022, a speeding driver ran a red light and struck my husband, Matt, in a crosswalk. He was riding his bike 15 feet in front of me and our two young children. The driver fled. Matt was 40.
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He was brilliant and creative, a patented inventor with a PhD in electrical engineering. At home he was present and devoted, filling the house with music and his cheerful whistling. Our children’s teachers used to remark on how he noticed every leaf and every bug on walks with our kids, joining in their curiosity. After nearly two decades with my best friend, he was gone in an instant.
There is no way to fully explain what it’s like to watch your life change like that, or to raise children who will grow up without their father because someone chose to speed again. But I know this: it didn’t have to happen.
The driver who killed Matt should not have been on the road. His license was revoked. And he had been caught driving on that revoked license 28 times.
Twenty-eight times the system found him. Twenty-eight times it told him he could not drive, and twenty-eight times he drove anyway. Then he ran a red light and killed my husband in front of our children.
Revoking a license is a legal instruction. It asks a dangerous driver to please stop driving. Roughly 75 percent of people with a suspended license keep driving anyway. That is what North Carolina’s answer to dangerous driving amounts to: a command that most people ignore, aimed at the drivers least likely to listen.
There is a technology that does something a suspended license cannot. Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) uses location-based technology to know the speed limit on the road a car is traveling, and it works to prevent the driver from exceeding that speed. It doesn’t ask. It doesn’t rely on the driver’s cooperation or his respect for a court order. It acts on the vehicle itself.
That distinction is everything in a case like Matt’s. Every one of those 28 stops was a moment when North Carolina had this driver in front of it and could have required that his car be equipped with this technology. Instead, each time, he was sent on his way.
This session, Rep. Mike Schietzelt filed House Bill 1199, which would require drivers who lose their licenses for extreme speeding to install Intelligent Speed Assistance as a condition of getting back on the road. It applies to a narrow group: drivers convicted of the most serious speeding offenses. It is not a mandate on ordinary North Carolinians. It asks nothing of the driver who goes five miles per hour over the speed limit on their way to work.
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It targets the people who do the most damage. In 2024, 378 North Carolinians were killed in speed-related crashes and almost 8,000 more were injured. A disproportionate share of that carnage comes from a small number of repeat offenders already known to the system and released to drive again.
ISA is not experimental. In 2024, Washington, D.C. passed the first ISA law in the country for persistent speeding offenders. Since then, eight states have passed similar legislation: Virginia, Washington, Maryland, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, and Arizona.
House Bill 1199 has not yet advanced. But the General Assembly is still in session, and it still has the chance to act.
I was in Raleigh this spring to tell legislators about Matt. I told them my children should still be able to have their dad walk them to school. I told them that Matt and I should have been able to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Those things are gone, and nothing can return them.
But this is not really about my family anymore. Somewhere in North Carolina right now there is a driver on his fifteenth stop, or his twentieth, ignoring his suspension, still driving. The state knows who he is. The state can require the technology that would stop his car from speeding.
Or it can tell him one more time that he isn’t allowed to drive, and wait to find out whose husband he kills.
Allison Simpson lives in Durham and is a member of Families for Safe Streets.
This story was originally published August 20, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline “NC man was caught driving on a revoked license 28 times. Then he killed my husband..”
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