Watch me explain how we tracked down a hit and run driver in a bicycle accident case.
So I want to tell you about a case that we handled involving a bicycle accident case and a car. So our client was riding his bike home one night from work late one night and as he’s driving home through the streets of Capitol Hill he gets hit from behind by a driver who then flees the scene. By chance, there happened to be witnesses on the street and our clients was so badly hurt he really had no recollection of his accident.
But the witnesses found the license plate had actually fallen off the car, this person had hit my client so hard. This defendant fled the scene, the police were called the police tried to do an investigation to find out where this person was from based on the license plate they found. The police checked a bunch of different address locations but were unable to locate the defendant driver. So, it was a classic hit and run sort of case and our client, when he came in to us, was trying to see if we could help him find the defendant and try to help him with his injuries.
He ended up having tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills for a serious leg injury and other injuries to his body. The first thing we did was we contacted the police in the case and the detectives who were working on the case and get some basic information about who they think the defendant was in the case.
This person clearly, sort of “lived off the grid” so to speak. He definitely gave fake addresses for his driver’s license and other addresses. He tried everything you do to try to be “off the grid”, so to speak. The police ultimately ran their investigation and kind of gave up after a while in trying to find the defendant driver.
We were unable to locate his car at that point. They couldn’t find it on the streets anywhere. What we did is we hired a couple different private investigators to first look into trying to figure out more information about the basic information about this driver: Where he last worked, What his last known address is was, things like that.
Some of those addresses came up with one location was literally an empty vacant lot so that’s how hard this guy was trying to not be found by people. This accident occurred two years ago and we have, consistently, over the past two years, hired different private investigators and worked with our own clients who had worked in the same industry as this defendant to try to figure out where he was.
At one point with we thought we had him working in a restaurant here in Denver. We sent out a private investigator to try to locate him there and he wasn’t working there anymore. We ultimately hired a new private investigator just at the end of 2011. This new private investigator, through the information that we were able to get them, and through their own contacts and their hard work located this guy working out of a restaurant in Englewood.
We were able to finally get him served, meaning we filed legal papers and a complaint against him so that we could try to bring him to court in this case. Through all this work, what we have discovered, and we just discovered the other day, is that he did actually have auto insurance on his car at the time.
To back it up even a little bit further, one of the things that’s interesting about this case is the police did find this guy’s car last year. He had ditched it in a parking garage not far from the accident and the car had been there the entire time in this parking garage and still had blood on the car from our client.
The police are still investigating the case now. There is a warrant out for his arrest the defendant driver’s arrest but we are the only ones who were able to actually get this guy.
Our next steps in this case are to try to get full compensation for our client and then also ultimately justice for our client through the criminal system as well. That’s just an idea of what we do to work on a case and how much we dedicate our time resources trying to help our clients.