Hit and Run (or I Don’t Want Car Accidents To Be An Annual Thing)

Again, not a post I was planning on writing today, but things happen and I wanted to vent on here.

You may remember that last year, I was in a car accident the week of my birthday. That sucked, and my car actually had to be towed away.

And yesterday, I got in another car accident. But this time, it was pretty different.

I had work in Santa Monica yesterday. I actually made pretty good time getting there, so I decided to run a quick errand before heading into work. As I was leaving the parking lot, another car decided to back out at that time and they backed into me.

As soon as I felt the impact (and it felt pretty big for a very low-speed accident), I put my car back into a parking space and ran out to talk with the other driver. Well, that driver decided that they didn’t want to talk to me.

I went over to their car and said, “Excuse me but you just hit my car”, but either she didn’t hear me or chose to ignore me (I think it was the second one). She drove away, but fortunately someone who was walking out of the store was able to get the license plate for me.

I got back into my car and called the non-emergency police line. Since I had to be at work, the police agreed to come to my work to get my statement (it was actually a fun distraction at work having a police officer in our trailer).

The police officer was actually pretty awesome. He was nice and was willing to hear all of the crazy details I remembered from the accident (like how the license plate frame said, “Warning, My Mother Is Driving”).

Part of the accident report was getting photos of the damage.

As you can see, it’s super minor damage. If the driver had stopped to talk to me, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. But since they technically fled after an accident, I wanted to report it.

Long story short (or shorter at least), when the officer went to interview the other driver (who was very easy to find since I got so much information about her car), she denied everything. She said that I wasn’t there when she backed out and that I made everything up. And when the officer went to look at her car, there was no damage (but there was an area where the dirt was wiped off that most likely occurred when she hit me). Since the accident took place on private property, there isn’t too much the police can do for me.

So what do I do now? Besides cursing at my bad car luck, the next step is to wait for the police report. It should be available for me in 10 days, and in it is the officer’s statement that although the other driver denied  anything happened, he believes that I’m the one telling the truth. I can use this report in case I chose to go to the other driver’s insurance to collect damages (the report will have the other driver’s info since I didn’t get it when the accident occurred).

So that was my Monday. Pretty exciting, huh? If nothing else, I got to freak out my co-workers when a police officer came to our work trailer asking for me. I don’t know if I’ll try to get my car fixed (since the other driver is denying everything, I will most likely have to civil sue her to get the money). So my car will have to show its battle scars for a while.

And hopefully, I will not have another incident in my car for a very very long time.

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