So many questions

By April Silvaggio  

DECEMBER 17, 2009 4:29 p.m. (0)

Jamie Ellis was married on Nov. 21, the week before Thanksgiving.

She and her husband, Michael, are building a house near his family’s home place in Piedmont, and hope it’ll be ready to move in early next week.

It is exciting, yet stressful. The kind of thing a daughter would talk to her mother about.

But Ellis can’t talk to her mother.

She was killed a year and a half ago by a driver authorities said sped away from the scene of the accident on White Horse Road.

Andrea Tara Hawisher, 46, was attempting to cross White Horse Road between Anderson Road and Welcome School about 10:15 p.m. the night of June 13, 2008, when she was struck by a vehicle. She likely died on impact.

It was a clear night with temperatures hovering around 85 degrees, and witnesses told state troopers they believed a pickup truck may have been involved. But evidence collected from the roadway instead pointed authorities to a Ford Crown Victoria.

“We received a complete list of all registered Ford Crown Victorias from the South Carolina DMV and physically examined all publicly owned vehicles and had all government agencies do the same,” said Lance Cpl. Kathy Hiles, a spokesman for the state Highway Patrol.

Specific vehicles registered to individuals in Greenville County who live in the vicinity of the hit-and-run scene were checked out, as were their owners, officials said.

“We also worked with out-of-state agencies on tips received on vehicles out of our area,” Hiles said. “But as of now, we have exhausted all leads.”

The trooper who investigated the accident, Lance Cpl. Russ Thompson, did not respond to requests for an interview, and other troopers could not say why the evidence found on the scene couldn’t narrow the vehicle down to one make or model or how many Ford Crown Victorias state troopers looked at.

Hiles said troopers in the Upstate deal with an overwhelming number of hit and run accidents. Most of those, however, involve only property damage.

Hit and run statistics nationwide show approximately 11 percent of all vehicle accidents are caused by drivers who then leave the scene, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Nationwide, officials say the number of pedestrians killed by hit-and-run drivers hit its highest level in more than a decade in 2006.

The increase compounds the problems of investigating hit-and-run cases, which law enforcement officials say are among the most difficult crimes to solve because they often occur at night and with no witnesses.

And even in cases where investigators are lucky enough to get the car, they still don’t always get the driver.

According to some of the most recent statistics available nationwide, 974 pedestrians were killed in hit and run accidents in 2005. Between 1994 and 2003, 14,914 people were killed in the U.S. in hit and run accidents.

The total number of pedestrian killed nationwide has increased by about 2 percent since 2000, but hit-and-run deaths have been steadily increasing at almost 10 times that pace, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Studies by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety link the increase to factors like more cars sharing the road with pedestrians, and increasingly distracted and aggressive drivers.

No national tally exists showing how many hit-and-run cases are solved. Neither does one exist for South Carolina.

So far this year in South Carolina, a total of 1,793 hit-and-run crashes have been reported, records from the South Carolina Office of Highway Safety show.

Of those accidents, six involved a total of seven fatalities, while 433 involved injuries sustained by 625 people. Authorities said 232 of those accidents occurred in Greenville County, and while none of them this year has proved fatal, 42 have involved injuries to 64 people.

Pedestrians were not identified in the state reports.

The statewide total was down from 2008, when 2,554 hit-and-run accidents were investigated across South Carolina. Of those hit-and-run accidents, 19 involved 21 fatalities, while 597 involved injuries sustained by 780 people. Two of those fatal accidents happened in Greenville County.

Forty-seven others investigated locally left 64 people injured.

“In so many cases, the public is hesitant about getting involved,” Yvonne Ellis, Jamie Ellis’ mother-in-law, said. “I think that is a major part of what is missing here. Somebody knows something.”

Jamie Ellis had been working in Greenville County’s 911 communications center the night her mother was killed. She left for home two hours before the first calls about the accident began coming in.

She is thankful she wasn’t the one who took the call.

“Our relationship wasn’t perfect,” said Ellis. Her parents divorced when she was two, and she was raised by her father, she said.

“But she was my mother,” Ellis said. “I would have liked for her to have been there with me on my wedding day. I would have liked it if she could have met Michael.”