A personal experience Halloween night.
At about 3AM, we were awakened by some loud noise outside our house. As I wandered around the house to see if there was a break-in attempt or something, I heard a very loud grinding sound in the street. Worried that the noise we heard had been someone trying to steal our utility trailer I ran out the front door and around the side of the house where the trailer was parked. It was still there but I could hear the grinding noise headed up the street. I quickly checked some other things like the gas grill on the back deck, etc. All still present, and I could still hear the noise so I went out to the street.
I could see grooves in the road at the entrance to our neighborhood, where clearly a car dragging something heavy had turned around. I realized that there had to have been some sort of accident and that they had driven away. I figured drunk driver, and was worried as to whether there may be anyone hurt. So I got some pants on and got in my car and drove up the road. I never saw any other evidence, just the grooves in the road. So I decided to follow them in case this idiot did some more stupid things.
The grooves weaved all over the road, in a very circuitous route through neighborhoods and even out onto Roswell Rd (120) for a short stint. Eventually I tracked the grooves all the way to Bonnie Glenn apartments on Power's Ferry Rd where I found a dark 4-door Honda on two tires--the passenger side tires were gone and the rims where ground down to the axle. I took down the license plate number and came home, not wanting to get in any sort of confrontation.
Mrs. Percy dialed the non-emergency number for the police and we described what we had seen, heard and discovered. The police operator repeatedly said that there's nothing to be done since there was no damage to our property (or any property that I had seen) and the car was now parked. I at least made sure to give them the license number and location in case this car might have been involved in a hit-and-run before they drove up in our our neighborhood.
After golf Saturday morning (played horribly again), I decided to go back up the road to see if I could find out how all this started. I walked about 3/4 mile up Old Canton following the grooves backwards hoping to find the origin. What I discovered was that the car had apparently been going north on Old Canton, had tried to turn left into a neighborhood about 100 yds north of Robinson, missed the turn, drove up onto the sidewalk, took out a bush and probably hit a phone pole but not hard enough to do any significant front-end damage.
They backed out of that mess, got back on Old Canton southbound, and quickly managed to run up onto the sidewalk again. The twin rubber stripes on the curb indicated to me that this was where they lost their tires. Now up on the sidewalk, they stay up there for a bit, narrowly avoid a mailbox, then swerved back onto Old Canton Rd using a driveway as a launching point. About 100 more yds south on Old Canton, their tires must have gone down entirely because there's some indicatation that they pulled off the road again. It looks like that's where they got out to check the damage. They had to back-and-forth to get out of the grass and back on the road. Shortly thereafter they tried to do a U-turn using the extra width our neighbohood entrance provided. Of course, they missed, tore up the curb and did more damage to their front rim and narrowly missed hitting a sign pole.
They back off the curb, completed their U-turn and drove off north again, where I tracked them as I described above.
I was glad to find that no other vehicles, people, or even animals seemed to have been involved. But I was disappointed that the police were not more interested, but I guess that there's no way to prove who was actually driving the car and unless there had been someone else involved then there's nothing much to be done. And the idiot has done about $1000 damage to his car and I doubt the insurance company will be paying anything.
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