Before a random Sunday morning last June, Ayal Chomsky had what he could only describe as “perfection:” marriage to the love of his life, 44-year-old Caryn Chomsky, who he met about 25 years ago on Birthright in Israel, two twin teenagers, who they had despite the odds, a peaceful West Boynton Beach home, a successful corporate law career.

Then, on June 9, a 19-year-old driver who said he fell asleep hit and killed Caryn while she was running on the sidewalk.

Six months later, Caryn is gone and the case against the driver, Myles Denard Scott, is nearing an end. Scott, who happens to live in the community neighboring the Chomskys’, received traffic tickets for careless driving and not staying in a single lane and a misdemeanor charge of driving with a suspended license, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Recently, prosecutors offered him a plea deal that would give him 30 days in jail, a tense Ayal Chomsky said Thursday, while telling his in-laws, Caryn’s parents, to fix their “Justice for Caryn Chomsky” T-shirts and gathering the 17-year-old twins, Maya and Etai, who had just gotten home from school.

To the family, it appeared that the justice system viewed Caryn’s death as inconsequential. No one could understand why Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputies had not tested Scott for drugs or alcohol, or why prosecutors had not charged him with vehicular homicide, typically used if someone drives recklessly and kills another person and which has accompanied other sleepy driving accidents. At one point, Chomsky read from a printed-out Florida statute that differentiated reckless driving from careless driving.

“I just don’t get it,” he said.

In response to questions over the lack of sobriety testing, Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera said the lead detective did not test Scott’s blood because he didn’t have probable cause, as Scott had not shown signs of impairment.

Caryn Chomsky’s is one of several recent South Florida cases involving drivers who said they fell asleep at the wheel, then killed pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists. Many times, officers who responded did not test their sobriety.

On Friday, prosecutors reached a plea deal with a Miami Beach man who said he fell asleep before running a red light and killing a 34-year-old on a motorcycle in April, though they accused officers in a court filing of mishandling the investigation and not completing sobriety tests, according to a recent NBC-Ch. 6 report . At first, Patrick Schiebel had received only a ticket, but now has pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide. Miami Beach Police are now conducting an internal affairs investigation.

Last month, Oion Johnson was sentenced to vehicular homicide in the death of Sunny LaValle, 44 and a mother of a 7-year-old, who he said he hit from behind while sleeping as she rode her bicycle in Weston. Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies also did not test Johnson for sobriety on that weekend morning in 2021, despite comments he had made about drinking, according to a close-out memo from the Broward State Attorneys Office.

“While the Defendant may have made statements about drinking, law enforcement did not ask for a consensual blood draw and determined they did not have probable cause to apply for a search warrant for a blood draw,” the memo reads.

Both Chomsky and LaValle’s families now want the Florida Legislature to pass a law that would require police to perform sobriety tests in any crashes that cause death or grievous injury.

Some say that such a law could infringe on Fourth Amendment rights. Officers already have strict guidelines they must follow to avoid doing so.

“If you’re driving legally through a green light and someone stops, steps off the sidewalk and right in front of your car, and you kill them, you didn’t do anything wrong,” said Matthew Konecky, a Palm Beach County criminal defense attorney who specializes in DUI cases. “Now you’re subjecting me to invasions of my personal liberty.”

The issue of whether a driver gets tested for drugs and alcohol comes down to the assessment of law enforcement, who must have probable cause in cases of death or serious injury in order to test for sobriety. If they speak to the driver, they rely on certain cues: eye movements, if they smell of alcohol, slur their speech, or sway while standing. If the driver is injured, officers can sometimes request a blood draw at the hospital.

Falling asleep at the wheel can also indicate that someone isn’t sober — drowsy drivers are statistically more likely to have been drinking than awake drivers — but police do not treat it as probable cause in the same way. Instead, some attorneys say the explanation can actually lead police to investigate less deeply than if the driver was awake.

“Oftentimes when someone says ‘I fell asleep,’ that’s where the police investigation ends,” said Gary Lesser, a personal injury attorney and former president of the Florida Bar who knows the Chomsky family personally. ” … If you have a loved one who’s killed by a driver who claims to fall asleep, and there’s no other investigation done, that really is a sense of justice denied for those families, and that has to be terribly upsetting.”

‘She thought she was having a beautiful morning’

The morning Caryn Chomsky died was bright and hot. Scott was nearing the end of his drive back from his grandmother’s house, where he would typically sleep after going out with friends, according to what his family told detectives and recorded on body camera footage.

As he drove down Atlantic Avenue just after 7 a.m., he closed his eyes, he told deputies, according to the footage. When he opened them, Chomsky’s body was on his windshield.

Scott had driven through the shoulder and straight into Chomsky where she and a running partner ran along the sidewalk, his car landing in a ditch next to the road. The running partner and another witness told investigators that Scott had not appeared to use his brakes or jerk his steering wheel, according to the report.

Fifteen minutes later, Scott stood on the sidewalk, also uninjured besides the shards of glass in his skin.

“She’s dead?” Scott asked a deputy in a hushed voice, according to the footage. In response to a gesture from the deputy, he asked, “So is that murder?”

“No,” the deputy said.

Soon after, as the reality of what happened set in, Scott began to sob and dry heave, sitting on the ground, his head in his hands.

“Myles, it’s okay,” the deputy said. “Myles. Myles.”

Talking to his grandmother on the phone a few minutes later, Scott said, “I just sent someone into their eternal life unintentionally. She thought she was having a beautiful morning and I thought I was going to get home safe.”

‘This screams DUI’

About a half hour later, another deputy arrived at the scene and the question of sobriety came up.

“This screams DUI all f****** day long,” the deputy said a little over an hour after the crash, the footage shows, after other deputies relayed to him what happened. A few minutes later, a deputy mentioned doing an “impairment assessment.”

Shortly after that, a deputy went to speak to Scott, asking where he had been coming from.

“The Turnpike,” Scott said. Then he said he wanted to talk to his attorney.

The lead investigator concluded in the report that Scott “did not display any indicators of impairment,” based on his own observations and those of another deputy. The report did not otherwise mention attempts to conduct sobriety tests or ask for blood. It also didn’t say whether a Drug Recognition Expert, or DRE, responded to the scene. Law enforcement agencies often use DREs to try to ascertain if someone was under the influence.

A couple hours later, a detective went to Scott’s home, where he asked Scott’s father about what he was doing the night before. His father said that he usually goes out with his friends in Fort Lauderdale, then spends the night at his grandmother’s before coming back home for church, though he doesn’t stay out too late. He didn’t say if that was what Scott had been doing that night.

Scott had a previous crash near the same area in 2022, according to court records. A Florida Highway Patrol trooper issued him a citation for failure to reduce speed to avoid a rear-end collision. A judge later dismissed the citation.

Chomsky’s family doesn’t believe that Scott fell asleep. They hired a crash reconstructionist who analyzed the moments leading up to the crash and concluded that Scott’s behavior did not match the behavior of someone who dozed off while driving. Scott’s attorney, Larry Handfield, did not return emailed requests for comment last week. A plea conference is set for Feb. 10. Scott rejected the plea deal originally offered by prosecutors, according to the Chomsky family.

Sunny LaValle

In some fatal cases, police who did not test for sobriety still determined that someone intentionally drove while drowsy, a form of reckless driving that can warrant a vehicular homicide charge. But detectives must prove that the driver knew they were tired before they fell asleep at the wheel.

They did so in the case of Sunny LaValle, who was riding her bicycle about 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning in May 2021 when Oion Skyvel Johnson hit her from behind in the bicycle lane. Johnson and his friends were on their way back from a weekend of partying in Miami, but police didn’t know that at the time.

Family members later gave BSO recordings of social media videos showing Johnson partying, according to the prosecutors’ memo. Detectives eventually retraced Johnson’s steps and determined that he had barely slept in the 36 hours leading up to the crash. As he was driving, one of his friends told them, he had rolled down the window in an effort to stay awake, according to the traffic homicide report. Prosecutors concluded they had sufficient evidence to charge Johnson with driving while knowing he was fatigued. He was sentenced in December to two years in prison.

LaValle, like Chomsky, left behind a family who grew increasingly frustrated with law enforcement’s handling of her case.

Her mother, Dr. Cheri Surloff, believes that Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies would not have investigated as thoroughly or uncovered the extent of Johnson’s fatigue if it weren’t for the pressure she and others put on them.

“But because we made such a big stink, then they did,” she said.

Johnson was sentenced to two years in state prison, with credit for the 263 days he already served, followed by 10 years of probation. Upon his release, his driver’s license will be revoked for five years. He will also be banned from using any non-prescribed drugs and required to undergo random drug testing.

It still wasn’t enough, Surloff maintains. Like the Chomskys, she now wants a law that requires sobriety testing in all fatal accidents.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions last week about the case.

Privacy vs. answers

In traffic accidents, police must walk a careful line between conducting thorough investigations and preserving people’s Fourth Amendment rights. But not everyone agrees on where that line should be.

“Law enforcement, they want to get bad drivers off the road,” said personal injury attorney Lesser. “They want to hold people responsible who cause death and serious injury. But right now we have constitutional protections. And without probable cause under current law, law enforcement really can’t go beyond that.”

Konecky, the defense attorney, recalled a case in which a client simply fell asleep at a red light. No one was injured, but police in that case did attempt both a roadside sobriety test and a breath test, which his client refused. The judge considered the stop lawful, but ultimately decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.

In fatal cases, Florida law gives investigators more power, but still requires them to have probable cause, or more reasons than not to believe someone was impaired.

“It’s like adding a marble to a scale,” Konecky said. “Every piece brings down that scale. The more you have, the more indicators, the more likely it is this person is under the influence.”

Philip Sweeting, a former deputy chief of Boca Raton Police who used to oversee traffic detectives, felt that deputies could have sought to draw blood in both Chomsky and LaValle’s cases because the fatal accident on its own was probable cause.

‘”If a guy hits a lady on the sidewalk, that’s their probable cause for taking blood,” he said.

But when drivers say they fell asleep, that offers an explanation that can halt further questioning, Lesser said. “If you’re awake, you have to answer a lot more questions from law enforcement: Where were you going? Where were you coming from? Who did you see? Did you have anything to drink? All those questions that come into play often don’t come into play.”

He thinks a broad law mandating sobriety testing would conflict with constitutional rights, but would support a law that gives law enforcement a detailed “checklist” in conducting fatal crash investigations.

“I’d love to see a different standard that would give more tools to law enforcement, to be able to do just a little more inquiry,” he added. “If you say ‘I’m so sorry, I fell asleep,’ and then you stop talking, where’s probable cause?”

‘I’ve had perfection’

Twenty years before the crash that took her life, Caryn Chomsky had another close call with death, but survived.

At only 24, Chomsky was diagnosed with cervical cancer and underwent radiation. The treatment cured the cancer but left her unable to bear children, along with other lingering health problems. So her own mother, Ann Stolper, at the age of 58, agreed to be Chomsky’s “gestational carrier,” and the twins were born. At the time, Stolper was the oldest woman to have a successful pregnancy.

Later, Chomsky grew a successful physical therapy business that helped many cancer survivors with swelling. She was “a kind soul,” Stolper recalled, to the point that it sometimes forced Stolper to overcome her own grumpiness: “I remember one day, I said, ‘I’m gonna go to the supermarket so I could be nasty to people, because I’ve been nice all day long.’ She said, ‘Mom, you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘why not?’ She said, because they’re all potential patients now.”

Chomsky sacrificed her own rest to meet patients, working 12-hour days, then still made time for running, Krav Maga and her family. Maya and her mother often cooked together, she recalled, or sat at the kitchen table, Maya doing homework, her mother doing paperwork. They shared clothes; Chomsky was trying on Maya’s clothes the night before she died.

Now, with Scott and his family living one community over, Ayal Chomsky fears seeing them every time he goes to the grocery store. In court, the families must come face to face; earlier this month, Chomsky lost his cool and yelled at Scott. Maya goes with her father, but Etai, who is more reticent about his grief, doesn’t want to.

“I’m bifurcated,” Chomsky said. “I’m actually trying to mourn my wife, but I can’t handle it … try mourning your wife who was killed in the most brutal sense. She had cancer 20 years ago. If I had lost her to cancer, I’d be mad at God, I can’t be mad at anyone else.”

Caryn’s death also changed the way the whole family looks at driving. Ayal Chomsky used to go on runs outside of their gated community, but he doesn’t anymore, Maya said. At first, the family didn’t want him to go running at all.

All Chomsky cares about now is getting justice, so he knows that he did everything he could. After the court case, he, like Surloff, wants to work on a state law. He’s already reached out to President-Elect Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office and Rep. Jared Moskowitz.

“My life is pretty much finished at this point,” Chomsky said matter-of-factly as he stood outside of the family home Thursday evening. “I’ve had perfection. My wife was perfect … my daughter says you shouldn’t be with anyone again. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I want my wife.”