Their 6-year-old dies in crash after driver flees cop over tints. Parents sue
When Samari Curbelo tries to fall asleep, she pictures her 6-year-old daughter in a casket and wonders whether she was in pain when she died.
“Is she calling for us? Does she know where she’s at?” said Curbelo, 35. “Those are things you don’t want to think about at night.”
Curbelo and Danny Tran, 31, became “childless parents” on May 5, 2024, when a driver fleeing a Coral Springs police officer hurtled across a busy intersection at more than 100 mph, slamming into the SUV carrying their daughter, Harlow Jet Tran.
Two years later, they’ve sued the city of Coral Springs, claiming Officer John Daddino, 32, an “officer of the year” hailed for his hundreds of traffic stops, initiated a high-speed pursuit over the car’s tinted windows, a minor traffic offense. The lawsuit is the second to be filed this year arising from accidents involving Daddino, court records show.
Daddino is not listed as a defendant in either lawsuit. But Tran’s parents argue his actions posed a risk to the public, including innocent passengers like Harlow, that outweighed any need for an immediate arrest.
The events leading up to the crash began a little after 5 p.m. on that May Sunday two years ago. Daddino tried to stop Chevon Dalton Graham for overly tinted windows while he was driving in the 8500 block of West Sample Road, a major roadway in Coral Springs, Graham’s arrest affidavit said. Graham quickly sped away in a 2023 white Mercedes.
The city says Daddino didn’t chase Graham — a claim being litigated.
Daddino, who has been with the department since 2021, “immediately, per department policy, shut off his emergency lights and sirens and was attempting to make a 90-degree turn,” police said in the arrest affidavit. At least one witness told police he saw Graham speeding, with Officer Daddino following behind.
At speeds up to 107 miles per hour, prosecutors say, Graham raced toward the intersection at West Sample Road and Northwest 85th Avenue.
At the same time, Harlow and her great-grandmother, then 71, had just left a relative’s barbecue, and were traveling in a gray 2018 Chevrolet Traverse. They were about 10 seconds from home. Seated in a child’s seat in the second row of the three-row vehicle, Harlow asked her great-grandma about a phone app, her parents said.
A moment later, Graham rammed into them, slicing the Traverse in half. The rear section, with Harlow still strapped in her car seat, launched like a missile before crash landing between a dumpster and a tree.
Harlow was airlifted by helicopter to Broward General in downtown Fort Lauderdale, where she died that day.
Meanwhile, Curbelo and Tran had rushed to the chaotic scene, after getting a phone call from Harlow’s great-grandma, who was shaken but not seriously injured.
People were shouting. A woman approached her, with arms covered in blood, telling Harlow’s mother: “I’m so sorry. I tried my best to save her.” Curbelo was confused. “I was like, ‘Save who? Who are you talking about?’”
After rescue workers left with their daughter, Curbelo and Tran rushed across the county to Broward General, where they were told Harlow had died.
Tran went into a room at the hospital to see his daughter’s body. As he remembered that day, he paused and gathered his emotion. He felt cold, he said, and the room filled with darkness.
“As soon as I saw her laying there, the room was just gray,” he said. “That’s why this house is so colorful.”
‘She just loved doing 6-year-old things’
On a recent weeknight, Curbelo and Tran sat side by side in their living room, a festive and whimsical room where every shelf is lined with Harlow’s tiny toy statuettes and trinkets.
A large portrait of Harlow in a light blue princess gown and tiara in front of the Disney World castle hangs next to the television. A mountain of plush toys are arranged on a white hanging egg chair. A fresh pink-frosted donut with sprinkles from Dunkin’ — Harlow’s favorite — sits on a shelf above a pink and purple butterfly-shaped urn that contains her remains.
Harlow was a first-grader at Somerset Academy Riverside, her parents said. She loved going to fairs, playing Roblox, taking ballet classes and spending time with her friends and family. She was newly into K-pop and loved lip-syncing.
“She just loved doing 6-year-old things — running outside, getting stinky, playing with bubbles,” said Curbelo, who had quit her job two days before the accident to be a stay-at-home mom.
Both parents’ arms are tattooed with their daughter’s drawings. The couple, who married in January, moved to a new home after Harlow died. Tran, a TSA agent at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, said they couldn’t bear looking across the hallway to see Harlow’s room with the light off.
Cop wasn’t chasing driver: City
The city of Coral Springs denies that Daddino chased Graham, according to its lawsuit response, and argues “even if a fact finder were to determine that a pursuit was initiated, that at no time did any City employees act recklessly or in wanton disregard of human life.”
The city also claims Harlow either wasn’t using or wasn’t properly wearing a seat belt and/or shoulder harnesses at the time of the crash, the response said, “which would have reduced or prevented the damages alleged.”
Coral Springs Fraternal Order of Police President Corey Logan said the accident was reviewed by the department and did not result in any disciplinary action against Daddino. He said Officer Daddino declined comment for this report.
A Coral Springs police spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment. The city of Coral Springs “cannot comment as this is open litigation,” attorney Chris Stearns said. The Herald requested on April 28 the crash report from Coral Springs police; the department has yet to provide it and has not responded to a Herald email asking when the report would be available.
As of Friday, Graham was being held at the Paul Rein Detention Facility in Pompano Beach, jail records show. Declared indigent, he was represented by a series of Broward public defenders until the office asked to be removed from the case, citing a conflict of interest. Court records do not show an attorney for Graham.
Graham’s mother, Antoinette Barrett, said her son was a “good boy” who left their Jamaican homeland for the United States in his early 20s. She said he had worked at a restaurant and a furniture store. When she learned of the accident, she wished she could speak to Harlow’s parents, she said, to tell them how sorry she is. In phone calls from jail, Graham asks his mother to “pray for me,” she said.
“He loves kids,” Barrett said. “I know he’s sorry. I know that.”
Smart, affectionate child
Harlow Tran was a funny, beautiful, smart, affectionate, sassy and confident girl, who deserved to live a long life, “and now she’s in an urn,” her godmother Grecia Sotomayor said.
Sotomayer said she lived with Danny, Samari and Harlow from when Harlow was months old until she was around 4. Samari has been her best friend for nearly two decades. Sotomayor doesn’t plan on having children, so Harlow was the closest she came to having one, she said.
Sotomayor was there for Harlow’s first nose bleed, when she learned how to walk and when she started eating solid food, she said. When she got older, they would go on “little dates” for sushi or Boba or go shopping at Five Below.
Sotomayor now treasures Harlow’s keepsakes, from her Elsa wig from “Frozen” to her tiny jean jacket.
“It’s just been very hard because you get to live with a child, you get to live life again through their eyes,” she said through tears. “And you can kind of see more of what’s important in life.”
Tran said he’s in the anger stage of grief, trying to accept that his daughter died over something as trivial as tinted windows. That same year, Officer Daddino was honored as “officer of the year” by the Broward County Chiefs of Police Association, in part for his prolific issuing of traffic citations. Court records show he continues the trend; in the first five months of the year he issued 500 citations.
In a lawsuit filed just four days before the Tran lawsuit, Daddino was accused of negligently crashing into a man named Louis Scinta on April 2, 2025, on Sample Road. The city argued he was “acting within the course and scope of his employment.”
Coral Springs Police Chief Brad Mock didn’t respond to a series of questions including whether the department’s internal affairs investigated either crashes or if Officer Daddino faced any suspensions or discipline.
In Tran’s lawsuit, her family is seeking financial damages for a series of costs including medical and funeral expenses, loss of companionship and mental pain and suffering.
At work, Danny Tran said, new employees ask if he has children. He tells them, yes, “I had a child. She passed.” They press for more.
“And sometimes I have to basically say a cop wanted to pull a guy over with tints, and she died,” he said. “And that sounds ridiculous. That sounds ridiculous.”
The couple hope to see Graham found guilty. Graham had two passengers in his Mercedes. Graham broke his nose, and the front-right passenger had a broken femur, or thigh bone.
But Tran and Curbelo aren’t sure what justice could look like for them, when it comes to Officer Daddino. There are questions they’d like to ask. And even more, they want to know if he realizes the importance of the little girl who died that day.
“I hope he does,” Tran said, “and I hope it haunts him.”
