On October 9th, a
woman was killed by a hit-and-run
driver in rural Snohomish County
north of Seattle, Washington.
On October 21st,
a detective from the Snohomish County
Sheriff’s
Office in Everett emailed Joseph
at RockAuto.com in Madison, Wisconsin
to request help identifying their
only clue, an inner fender with a
couple of zip ties attached.
The inner
fender is a piece of black plastic
that lines the wheel well
above the tire. The inner fender
left at the crime scene had no part
numbers or other identifying marks.
Joseph looked through some of the
inner fender photos in RockAuto.com’s
online auto parts catalog and asked
around the warehouses a bit. He quickly
learned he was searching for the
proverbial black plastic needle in
a haystack of auto parts.
That is when Joseph
called Carl at Sherman Body Parts
just outside of Detroit. Sherman
supplies RockAuto with quarter panels,
grilles, cross members, rocker panels,
and lots of other body parts including
inner fenders. With just a couple
of photos, Carl went to work identifying
that inner fender from Washington
State.
And Carl did
it! He determined the inner fender
came from the left front
wheel well of a ‘99-‘04
Chevrolet Tracker, ‘99-‘05
Suzuki Vitara, or '01-'06
Suzuki XL-7.
The sheriff’s
detective contacted the Washington
State Department of
Licensing and got a list of 1300
Chevrolet Trackers and Suzukis registered
in Snohomish County. A new search
for a needle in a haystack began.
The big break
came when the detective phoned
seeking info on a Chevy Tracker
registered at a residence approximately
15 miles from the crash site. The
woman who answered the phone said
her nephew had sold the Tracker and
recently moved to an apartment complex.
She agreed to ask her nephew to call
with information on the Tracker’s
new owner.
The nephew received the message
from his aunt and excitedly told
his roommate that his old SUV might
have been involved in a crime. The
roommate said he had seen a Tracker-like
vehicle with front-end damage in
their own apartment complex parking
lot!
The detective came out and walked
around the apartment complex. He
found a Suzuki Grand Vitara with
front end damage. Remarkably, it
was mostly old front-end damage preceding
the hit-and-run.
The old damage
had been repaired with zip ties.
The left inner fender
was missing. The zip ties found on
the inner fender at the crime scene
matched the zip ties on the Vitara
and zip ties found in the Vitara
owner’s boyfriend’s garage.
Last week, the Grand Vitara owner,
a 46 year old woman, confessed to
the hit-and-run. She showed no remorse
and only regretted that she would
be unable to smoke cigarettes in
jail.
It is amazing that this case was
solved in less than a month with
just an inner fender to work from.
It was miraculous that the former
Tracker owning nephew just happened
to have moved to the apartment complex
where the guilty Vitara was sitting.
A hit-and-run makes the world seem
like a cold and heartless place,
but maybe that was offset a bit by
the extended community in Washington,
Wisconsin, and Michigan that came
together to solve this crime.
Tom Taylor,
RockAuto.com |
