Fatal Lake County crash highlights difficulty in solving hit-and-run cases
The night rain grew from an annoying spit to a hard shower as the scooter carrying a young couple new to Central Florida splashed homeward.
“Slow down, babe. I don’t think they’re gonna stop,” 18-year-old passenger Alley Swisher shouted in the ear of her boyfriend Patrick Burns, 26, as a white car rolled up to a dark intersection in east Lake County.
The car didn’t stop. As shown on an autorepair shop’s security camera, it drove through a stop sign at Central Avenue and County Road 437, mowed over the scooter, then drove away. Burns, lying in the road, was run over by another car and died.
Florida Highway Patrol investigators have made no arrests in the July 12 crash, highlighting the difficulty of solving hit-andruns, an increasing challenge in Central Florida. Troopers in Central Florida investigated 31 fatal hit-and-runs in 2016, the re-
gion’s worst one-year total ever and worst in the state last year.
They cleared seven of those cases by arrest and charges are pending in nine more, but investigators have not located the suspect or vehicle in 15 other fatal hit-and-run crashes, including 10 in Orange County, FHP Sgt. Kim Montes said.
FHP Troop D, headquartered in Orlando, patrols an area that includes Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties and is the unfortunate state leader in fatal hit-andruns this year, too. The tally is 18 through the first eight months of this year, Montes said. She did not have arrest statistics for 2017.
In August, Troop D fielded 970 reports of hitand-run crashes, an average of 30 a day. Most are non-injury, property-damage crashes.
Montes described hitand-runs as an epidemic, noting Troop D has assigned an investigator to follow up non-fatal crashes. The troop also assigns traffic homicide investigators to the fatal ones.
“It is very time consuming to follow up on tips and leads for a hit-and-run case,” she said.
The Sorrento unsolved despite the videotape footage and a cross and cardboard sign at the scene appealing to the public for help through Crimeline. The sign, like the initial FHP report, misidentified the suspect vehicle as a white Kia. Troopers now say it’s a white 2002 Ford Focus.
Aided by a flurry of Crimeline tips, investigators identified a Lake County woman as a “person of interest” but can’t yet make an arrest partly because they haven’t found the car, Montes said.
“The burden is on law enforcement not only to prove it’s the vehicle that was involved in the crash but then also to prove who the driver was at the time of the crash,” Montes said. “Owners are not compelled under Florida law to tell law enforcement who was driving their car.”
Richard Jiminez, whose security camera captured the Sorrento crash and its aftermath, expressed disgust with the driver who fled.
“You hit somebody, stop. Maybe you didn’t see ‘em, whatever it was. Stop. Have some decency,” he said.
He said he believes if the driver had stopped, other northbound cars would have been forced to stop, too. At least one hit Burns.
Swisher said Burns yelled for her to alert oncoming cars. They were too hurt to get out of the road.
“He was like, ‘Babe, tell them to stop, please.’ He just kept repeating, ‘Stop. Stop. Stop.’ I was on my side, trying to wave my arms and they still weren’t slowing down,” Swisher recalled in a phone interview from Indiana. “I thought, ‘well, this is it’ and just put my arm over my head.”
One car flew past on the left. But a Prius plowed over Burns, then pulled over and stopped.
Swisher said she was holding onto her boyfriend’s belt with one hand and remembered he suddenly was ripped from her grasp.
Her legs broken, Swisher appealed to other motorists who stopped to look for her boyfriend.
All that she saw was his shoe in the road.
“I told random people, ‘Find him, please. He’s got to be somewhere out here. He was laying next to me just a second ago,’” she begged. “‘Look in the bushes, in the grass, over the fence, look under cars.’” That’s where they found him.
Evicted from their apartment in Indiana in April, Burns and Swisher arrived in Central Florida in May after a 28-hour bus ride.
Swisher had never even met her mom, who left the baby girl at three months and took off to Florida, but she offered Swisher and Burns a pair of Greyhound tickets to Orlando, a room in her trailer in Sorrento and a fresh start. Swisher found work at a horse farm near her mom’s trailer and Burns got a job with a road crew building a stretch of the Wekiva Parkway nearby.
The couple, who planned to marry, took an Uber ride to Gainesville a few weeks later and bought the scooter there for $375.
They rode it back to Sorrento, a trip of 100 miles and 3 ½ hours without helmets.
The hit-and-run crash also caused other injuries to Swisher that required doctors to insert screws and rods.
The couple, who had been apartment-hunting in Eustis the day of the crash, were less than two miles from the mom’s trailer.
“It’s horrible, devastating,” said Alisa Swisher, 48, Alley Swisher’s mother. “They were starting a new life. They both had good jobs.”
A co-worker at the horse farm bought Swisher a plane ticket back to Indiana, where she has undergone more surgeries.
On Facebook, she wrote about her boyfriend.
“My world. I miss your hugs, your kisses, your voice, I miss you sleeping next to me. I miss our cuddles, our movie night, God, I miss you more than you know. … I will meet you at the gates of heaven when its my time, where we walk together and be together forever! Just as planned.”
The post include emojis of a ring, a kiss and a broken heart.
Asked about the driver who fled, Swisher described the driver as “a coward … a heartless coward.” shudak@ orlandosentinel.com; 407-650-6361 or on Twitter @Bearlando