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Mother Prepares For Sentencing Of Daughter's Killer In Hit-And-Run

KENDALL (CBSMiami) – The man convicted in a Kendall hit and run that left an 11-year-old girl dead will be sentenced Thursday.

Harvey Abraham was found guilty last year of leaving the scene of an accident involving death and tampering with evidence.

Police said he struck and killed Ashley Valdes and did not stop to render aid.

'She was very much my best friend," Adonay Rosete said of her daughter, Ashley, the night before the sentencing.

Valdes was killed while crossing the street after a substitute bus driver dropped her off on the wrong side of the road in Kendall in January 2009.

A pick-up truck driving along SW 80th Street at SW 149th Avenue plowed into her, and the driver kept going.

"He took two lives that day," Rosete told CBS 4's Lauren Pastrana.

Police caught up with Harvey Abraham a week later.

Prosecutors said he was trying to get his car repaired and told cops the thought he'd hit a dog.

"He knows it was a person," Rosete said. "He's a liar. That's what I want to tell him."

Rosete will get her chance to say that and more to Abraham at his sentencing. He's facing up to 35 years in prison. She will be reading an impact statement in the courtroom.

"I'm going to go with the same dress I buried my daughter. I want to bury him, and when I say 'bury him', I mean anything. Thoughts, memories, seeing, (the) accident. Just bury him and let him go," Rosete said.

Rosete said she can't bear to watch cover and hit and run accidents on the news.

There have been plenty since her daughter's death.

"It's an epidemic, I call it. To say everyday, 'another one, another one'." That is sad to say, 'Oh, another one.' It wasn't like that before," Rosete said.

Her daughter's death spurred the "Ashley Alerts", text messages that alert people in Miami-DadeCounty to crimes like hit and runs as well as other traffic and safety related issues.

Click here to sign up for the notifications:

Rosete hopes the alerts can one day help someone who shares her same pain.

"It's like being on a boat on the ocean and you don't know where you're going and you just pray you can survive one more day," she said.

There's now a traffic signal at the intersection where Ashley died and part of the street was renamed after her.

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