I was a "hit & run" victim the other day.

Tuesday afternoon I was sitting at a red light in the east-bound lane of Meramec in south St. Louis. A woman driving south on Broadway swerves over and crashes into the right front fender of my car. Her car then hops the curb and ends up in the grass.

I'm okay.

I look over at my son who's in the passenger seat.

He's okay.

So now I'm thinking---how's the other driver? Is she okay?

I put the car in park and get out to check on this woman. As I'm walking over to her car, what does she do? She starts to take off.

My first reaction is....huh?

Then it's...what?!?

Then it's....WHAT THE?!?!?

She races across the grass, jumps the curb back onto the street and races up Ohio which is just a block to the west of Meramec & Broadway. In the meantime, it's now registered in my head that she has no intention of stopping so I'm running down the stree ttrying to catch up to her so I can get the number on her license plate.

In my mind I think I look like Mel Gibson in "Lethal Weapon 2" running at full speed down some Los Angeles freeway trying to catch up to the South African bad guys who are getting away. In reality, I'm sure people who saw me thought to themselves, "Oh, how sad. This guy with a bum knee is hobbling down the road and he thinks he's actually going to catch that car..."

But this is where some of my fellow-St. Louisans stepped up and really helped me out.

First, a woman in an SUV who was right behind me when this car ran into me rolls down her window and tells me she got the license plate number, or at least most of it. A few minutes later another woman drives up and says she saw me running down the street after the car, figured out what was happening and she followed the car and wrote down some of the license plate as well. A few minutes after that, as the police officer is filling out the incident report another man comes up to me and tells me he was in the Walgreen's parking lot across the street and saw what happened. He jumped into his car, followed the woman and was able to get the license plate as well, along with the make and model of the car. He said it was a Monte Carlo.

The police officer ran the plate and it came back to a '96 Pontiac. So the plate was either stolen or switched with another car. I have a feeling if this woman is ever caught she'll have no insurance and I'll have to eat the deductable on the repairs. I'm no expert on the cost but the collision pretty much tore up the grill, the turn indicator, the right front fender. I figured it was at least $2,000 in damage. The estimate came back at $2700.

I was talking with a police officer a few years ago and he was telling me about the dangers of all those high-tech crime shows. He said for even the simplest crimes the public expects you to haul out all the high-tech gadgetry.

Oh, your car was broken into and someone stole your radio?

You want us to dust for fingerprints?

Take hair and fiber samples from your car's floor mat?

Call in the folks from CSI..?!? The real ones AND the fake ones from the CBS show...?

Get the chief down here to personally handle the case?

At KMOV we have a program called "Do the Right Thing." It teaches kids to do just that--the right thing. Apparently, there's a woman driving around south St. Louis with a banged up front end in a light gray Monte Carlo who could learn a thing or two from these kids.

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