TOMS RIVER, NJ – The grieving family of David Kilasi, who tragically lost his life in a car crash on the Garden State Parkway in July 2022, has filed a wrongful death discrimination lawsuit against the New Jersey State Police. The lawsuit alleges that harmful stereotypes of Black drivers led a trooper to assume Kilasi had fled the scene, resulting in a lack of immediate response that could have saved his life.
On July 9, 2022, David Kilasi was driving his sister to a friend’s party using his uncle’s 2003 Honda Pilot. They returned home early the next morning, but David Kilasi mysteriously drove away after dropping off his sister, and it was the last time his family saw him alive.
The lawsuit, filed by the Fuggi Law Firm in Toms River, details that the Honda Pilot had crashed, striking a guardrail along the Parkway, rolling down an embankment, overturning, and hitting a tree. It came to a stop near mile marker 60.5. A trooper found the wrecked vehicle around noon on July 10, but instead of launching a search for potential victims, the trooper assumed it had been abandoned. The trooper ran the license plate, saw that it was registered to a Black driver, Joseph Karanja, and called for the vehicle to be towed without further investigation.
For the next two days, calls to David Kilasi’s cell phone went unanswered, and his worried parents, unaware of the crash, assumed he was at a friend’s house.
Only on July 12, the auto insurance company alerted the family about the “abandoned” vehicle. Kilasi’s parents then filed a missing persons report with the Little Egg Harbor Police.
The lawsuit contends that the trooper racially profiled the assumed driver, unjustly concluding that he had fled the scene to avoid legal trouble. The family, not knowing about the crash, drove up and down the Parkway in search of any signs, unknowingly passing by the location where their son was still lying injured.
It was only on July 13 that State Police detectives visited the family’s home, confirming that David Kilasi’s body had been found along the wooded median. An autopsy revealed evidence of a severed spinal cord injury, suggesting that he might have been alive after the crash.
The lawsuit, brought forth by Kenneth Luvai and Leah Kilasi, seeks unspecified damages, including legal fees, and demands a trial to address charges of wrongful death, negligence, and discrimination against the New Jersey State Police and the specific trooper involved in the case.
David Kilasi’s father, Kenneth Luvai, who also works as a pastor at Lighthouse Bible Tabernacle in Elizabeth, has been deeply affected by the loss, described in the lawsuit as, “There are no words to describe the mixture of anger, horror, and grief Plaintiff Luvai felt in those moments, save to say that it will haunt him for the rest of his days.”
The New Jersey State Police have not yet responded to requests for information regarding the incident.