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Man gets 12 years for leaving site of crash that killed teen

By DONG-PHUONG NGUYEN
Published February 16, 2007

TAMPA - They were two strangers whose lives intersected on a cool night in March. The pedestrian, a 16-year-old girl with curly blond hair and a smile that could light up a room, died that night. And now the driver, a floor installer with an 8-year-old daughter, will go to prison for leaving her in the road.

Micah Azbill, 31, was sentenced Thursday in Hillsborough Circuit Court to 12 years in prison for not stopping after the March 18 accident.

Azbill, who has a lengthy history of driving offenses, drove off after hitting Devyn Burke on U.S. 41 in Lutz. He abandoned his car after it broke down seven miles from the crash site, then walked a mile to a friend's house before that friend told him to go back.

Judge Lamar Battles cited Azbill's driving history and blatant disregard for the victim in handing down the relatively harsh sentence. Azbill could have received as little as 22 months.

Azbill won't ever be allowed to have a driver's license in Florida.

Devyn's friends and relatives, who wore T-shirts bearing smiling photographs of the girl, celebrated the sentence. It was a bittersweet end to almost six hours of testimony from the families of the victim and the defendant.

Azbill, who did not show any emotion during testimony from medical experts and traffic investigators, slumped down and openly sobbed when his sisters apologized to Devyn's family.

He continued to cry as he read from a two-page letter.

"I would like to express my deepest apologies," he said. "If there were anything I could do to make this all go away, I would do it in a second."

[Last modified February 16, 2007, 01:36:37]