The noise the car made as the driver forced it aross 4th Street late last night was a high-pitched squeal, like an animal being forced onward despite a badly injured hoof. It was a metallic grating much too loud for the driver not to notice, indicative of the kind of damage no one would continue to inflict on his car under normal circumstances, damage so severe that the car appeared difficult to handle and dangerous to drive.
A friend said he had seen this kind of thing before. This was probably someone who had just committed a hit-and-run and was fleeing the scene, he said. It made sense to me, and as the square-backed machine squealed down Junipero Avenue I called 911 and informed the police of our suspicions. I was clear that we had not actually seen an accident, but that the damage was so obvious and the behavior so conspicuous that they might want to check it out. Three minutes later a police car quickly pulled up and asked us where the car had gone. All we could do was point south and watch the cruiser whoosh on its way.
I had lost focus on the car as I communicated with the 911 operator sometime after it crossed 3rd Street, and so the police—who could not have responded more quickly—had little to go on. The car’s grinding was audible from blocks away, but it had gotten out of range and/or stopped by the time police arrived, and so they would have needed to get lucky to find it.
In late 2011, I believed I might have encountered a bicycle thief, and I let the police know; they checked it out and determined that the guy was on the up-and-up. My suspicions about what I witnessed last night may be wrong, too. For all I know the driver was the victim of a hit-and-run, not a perpetrator, and just wanted to get his damaged vehicle home and call a tow truck in the morning. The point of this article is that we can only do the best we can. Neither I nor the police knew what the story was. But sometimes all you can do is take your best guess and use the resources at your disposal to see whether you’re right.
Perhaps somewhere near Junipero Ave. north of 4th St. at around 10:30PM someone’s vehicle was damaged by a dark blue car of a model resembling those in the accompanying pictures. And so if sometime during the next couple of days you catch sight/sound of a car like that with clearly audible damage to the left front wheel being driven by an African-American male around 40 years of age, you might want to jot down the license-plate number and let the police know. Maybe it’s nothing. But if it is indeed something, you might have helped the police do exactly the kind of thing we all want the police to do.