"This man has no character," Thomas Keefe, an attorney for the parents of Kelli and Jessica Uhl, told AOL News today. Keefe said he was disgusted but not surprised that Matt Mitchell wanted money from the state. "To this day he has never said he's sorry. Not once. So what would you expect of such a person?"
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Matt Mitchell, shown Monday on "Today," wants the state of Illinois to pay for the injuries he sustained in 2007, because he was on duty at the time of the double-fatal crash.
The mother of the girls also went on TV today to talk about the tragedy. "My daughters were killed by someone who was sworn to protect and serve them," Kimberly Schlau told NBC's "Today" show this morning.
Mitchell was sending e-mails and talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone in 2007 when he lost control of his patrol car on his way to an emergency and jumped a median, colliding head-on into a car on the other side of the highway and killing Kelli, 18, and Jessica, 13. He has pleaded guilty to reckless homicide and reckless driving.
He was on paid leave for two years until he resigned from the force after pleading guilty in criminal court. But during a civil suit, the former trooper denied any guilt.
"When [Mitchell] filed for benefits, I thought well, that's exactly what I would expect from a person who sat up on that stand and looked at that family and said, 'I'm not responsible for the death of your children,'" Keefe said. The attorney thinks it's likely that Mitchell will win the workers' compensation, since he was on the job at the time of the crash.
Ed Herman, an attorney and spokesman for Mitchell, declined to comment specifically about the case. "The state of Illinois has a process for these claims, and we need to let the process play itself out without outside influence," he said by telephone.
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Schlau, who has spent the past three years advocating for safer driving laws, said the law on workers' compensation may need to be changed as well. "It's just one more policy that's been pointed out to us that we might want to look at changing," Schlau told NBC.But she said she was more focused on preventing such a tragedy from ever happening again, and keeping the memory of her girls alive. She sometimes speaks to newly inducted state troopers about highway safety.
"I tell them the story of Jessica and Kelli and what happened that last day, and I show them the last photograph of them that was taken just mere hours before they were killed," she said. "And I ask them to remember their faces while they're driving and while doing their jobs to make sure that no other family has to go through what their father (Brian Uhl) and I have gone through."