Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Yes, I'm finally getting around to posting photos from Tuesday night's hit-and-run. Here's my car (all of these photos link to Flickr pages with larger sizes available):

The photo I took before my test-drive (not included here, because the daylight photos came out so much better) has the broken-off part of the wheel cover up and the remaining part down -- so it looks like the upper half of my wheel got smacked at least as hard as my fender. So the handling problems I observed are really unsurprising. I'm nearly certain that the alignment is out; I just have to hope that there's nothing more serious than that as well (folks have suggested lost wheel weights or a bent wheel -- if that means a bent rim, then I'm figuring those probably aren't any more serious than needing a front end alignment). I was told informally by the person I spoke to at my insurance company that on a seventeen year old car, if there's any suspension or steering damage, the car will be totalled. Which was what I had already guessed. It just doesn't take very much to total a car this old, no matter how nicely it ran beforehand.

Here are photos of the damage to my neighbour's cars, except the wagon the Miata got pushed into (because its visible damage wasn't much to look at (though the owner wondered whether there would be transmission damage from being pushed that far)):

My next-door neighbour's Miata, which was pushed into my across-the-street neighbour's VW station wagon, and in turn pushed the VW forward about six feet, was the first car struck:

Among the broken glass and assorted car parts behind the Miata, we found this bottle:

It may have already been lying there before the collision, but based on its position within the debris (surrounded by window and taillight bits without many on top of it) and the extremely clumsy and erratic way the driver was driving, I suspect it was tossed out through his broken window before he backed up. Unless the police found him in time for a blood alcohol test to be meaningful, or he mentioned it in his statement to the police, this notion will have to remain labelled speculative. (In the meantime, here, have a nice picture of an empty brandy bottle lying on the sidewalk...)

While bits of the striking car's left-hand windows were scattered all over the street, parts of them wound up atop and inside the Miata[*], and the largest portions landed (cracked and folded but with pieces still touching) up next to the Miata's door. And on the roof of the Miata was a baby's sock, making all of us wonder -- and worry -- whether the driver had had a tiny passenger (it appears he did not; the sock must have been loose in the car). I tried to photograph the sock where it landed, but this camera doesn't handle "small reflective object on a dark feild in a flash photo" at all well, so I settled for shooting it lying on the street in daylight the next afternoon, after the Miata was towed away. I'm still toying with this photo, sorting out how to adjust it to bring out the sparkle of the broken glass, and I also shot several frames on film to play with later (when I get around to getting that roll developed). This is the most manipulated image of this set, being edited in a "making art" headspace instead of a "document as accurately as possible" approach. (The other photos here have been cropped, one rotated a couple degrees I think, and have had overall brightness levels adjusted using the "levels" or "curves" tool in GIMP, with ability to make out detail without distorting reality being the goal. This image, on the other hand, has been selectively adjusted -- I cut out the sock and pasted it in a new layer, then adjusted the levels of each layer (and applied a sharpening filter) separately, then re-joined the layers and tried to fix the resulting border artifact -- with "make it dramatic" being the goal. Given that I am posting it amongst a bunch of documentary photos and a factual description of events, I felt it was important to point out that this image differs from the others in this entry in that important respect. Expect to see versions of this image and related ones again in the future, as I come up with edits I like better.):

The driver wound up with his front bumper a foot or two away from the wall of the house the Miata and VW were parked in front of. He then reversed straight across the street and backed into another neighbour's car:

That's the one where the mechanism inside the door is so munged that the door cannot be opened (a failure mode it makes sense to deisgn for, as opposed to making doors more likely to spring open when damaged, but a problem the next day regardless).

Finally, here's the car that did all this damage. Around the time I finished talking to the police, I heard that the car had been located not far away. So when I took my test drive to evaluate the damage to my car, I stopped there to take some photos. That was where I found out that the car had been taken by the (if I'm remembering the relationships and who was who correctly) owner's daughter's boyfriend. I overheard the police saying something about how it "wasn't stolen" because the ignition was intact (someone later clarified that as the distinction between "theft" and "unauthorized use" of a vehicle ... lawyer friends, have I understood that correctly?); the owner was calling it stolen, saying that the boyfriend had swiped the keys; I heard that in the driver's statement to the police he claimed to have been given permission to borrow the car (but, uh, what else would you expect him to say about that[**]?). I'm waiting to hear from the owner's insurance company whether they're going to cover the damage to my car and my neighbours' cars, or treat it as a stolen-car situation and kick it all back to be covered as uninsured-motorist claims.

As you can see, it was the driver's side doors, not the front bumper, that slammed into the Miata. So the driver must have somehow gotten it moving at an impressive speed up Lombard St. sideways. We didn't hear a skid before the thump, and the road didn't seem that wet when we were standing around waiting for the police (and the remaining ice was on the sidewalks and in the eastbound parking lane, not in the travel lanes or behind the Miata), but it was raining and the street was at least a little wet. I've no idea how fast the car had to have been moving.

I'm surprised this car was able to flee the scene so effectively.

There were three bullet holes in the car, the two pictured here and another in the hood. I'm told the driver did this himself after he parked the car, in some sort of attempt to make the owners think something different had happened than his taking the car and crashing it. (I don't quite understand his reasoning there.)

A thought expressed several times that night: it's a wonder he didn't kill anybody. It's lucky nobody was hurt.

Looking for a silver lining to all this: I got to meet more of my neighbours and got email addresses for a couple of them. And, well, I got a story to tell (not that my life has any shortage of those!).

[*] Our best guess as to how the broken glass wound up inside the Miata is this: while the crumple zones fore and aft were crumpling, the passenger compartment probably flexed and then sprung back. It probably flexed enough to make a gap between the convertible roof and the tops of the windows, through which the broken glass flying from the other car entered. After the impact, when everything that was going to rebound had rebounded, the passenger compartment was again closed up as it had been before, but with glass from the other car inside. Does ayone who know more about automobile crashes care to comment on how likely this hypothesis sounds?

[**] For that matter, what could you expect the owner to say, assuming she knows how her insurance works, other than that the car was stolen? Although I've got a pretty strong gut feeling as to whether the (unlicensed, IIRC) driver had permission to use the car, I'll play it safe and just describe this as a "he-said-she-said" situation until the police and/or the courts and/or the insurance company figure it out with more certainty.