MEDICINE HAT, AB — Hit and run collisions can happen in front of your home, late at night or in the middle of a parking lot.
The Medicine Hat Police Service said there were more than 400 reports made last year.
Roughly two weeks ago, one incident was caught on camera.
Serge Yudenkov lives on 12 Street SW and said the area is normally pretty quiet.
“It’s a smaller, residential neighbourhood,” he said. “Don’t really see very many people driving overly fast.”
He was shocked to see what happened to his car, thanks to his neighbour’s surveillance video.
Yudenkov was inside, getting ready to leave for work early on March 13th.
At about 7:10 a.m., he went outside to start his car.
He didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, at least, not at first.
“I started clearing the snow off the car and I noticed that the car [was] parked a little bit sideways and I didn’t recall parking this way,” he said.
His next door neighbour came out to say she’d heard a crash just minutes beforehand.
“My neighbour asked me whether my car got hit and then I realized that there’s the dent,” Yudenkov said.
The video shows a vehicle driving on the sidewalk and colliding with Yudenkov’s Mazda, parked on the street outside of his home.
The driver gets out and appears to survey the damage, before getting back into the vehicle and driving away.
Yudenkov was quick to call police and pick-up the pieces which were left behind.
“[There was] a Dodge emblem,” he said. “There’s also paint chips, also there’s [part of a] headlight.”
“We are seeing a lot of hit and runs each year and it only seems to be getting worse,” said Sgt. Clarke White. “We’re going to try and communicate a little better with the body shops and hopefully they can help us out.”
White said 461 hit and runs were reported in 2017, more than one per day.
He added that many happen when a vehicle is parked legally.
Clarke said that even though surveillance video can help police in some investigations, it’s not the only thing they need.
“It’s tough to get a licence plate off video surveillance,” he said. “You might witness, in some video, you have a clear description of a vehicle, but you don’t have a licence plate. If the vehicle’s a very common one, it’s very difficult for us to track it down. If there’s 200, or even 100 in the city, it’s difficult for our officers to go around, one by one, and try and track those down to locate damage.”
Yudenkov hasn’t given up.
He has shared the video on Facebook in hopes of finding the person who was behind the wheel.
“I’m past the point of trying to recover any damages or anything like that,” he said. “Just want to make sure that the driver realizes that it was pure reckless behaviour. It was pure luck that no one got hit.”
