I spend my days working in various capacities in the wonderful world of accident reconstuction. Today was a very frustrating day for me, but my wife had an even worse day.
She's done for the day, goes out to her car, and discovers that her car (in the employee lot) has been hit and damaged on the front driver's side. The lot is not big enough for all of the employees cars, so they are packed in tight with people blocking each other. Employees have to go out and play musical cars as various people go on and off the clock. About a month ago, somebody put a dent in the middle of the hood on my wife's car. She has a running unpleasantness with three coworkers, mostly because the three (including her manager) cannot conduct their drug sales (during breaks) in the parking lot when my wife works. Various forms of harrassment take place, and my wife is looking for a new job. The owner won't address it, as none of this ever happens while he is there. I'm not convinced that he isn't involved.
Anyway, about three weeks ago, a dent shows up in the hood of my wife's car. We suspect one of the three, but don't know for sure. Four days ago, a scratch with some paint transfer matching one of the cars driven by one of the three, but the green car is so beat up, we can't match up any of the damage with a high degree of confidence. I work in accident recon, so I'm familiar with this sort of thing, and know there just isn't enough to work with.
Today, she finds a scratch, a distinctive dent, and paint transfer. Black paint on her red car. One of the drug dealers went out earlier, moved her black car, came back into work, and shortly afterwards my wife got to leave. My wife goes out ot the lot, comes back into work and starts asking who hit her car. There are two black cars in the lot, one SUV that was moved, with red paint transfer on their black spare tire carrier (on a nub the same shape as the dent in our car) and another truck that hasn't been moved all day.
The owner of the black SUV angrily offers that she didn't hit anything and doesn't no anything about it. My wife hadn't asked her yet. The owner of the business steps in and tells my wife too bad, that's the risk of working there, lots of cars have been damaged in the lot. Just go home. Don't worry about it. It's not a lot of damage (probably $400-600 range to repair).
My wife calls and tells me what happened. I tell her to stay there, and show up with my camera a few minutes later. I take some pics of the damage on our car, then on the other car. The owner of the business comes out and tells me to go home, he says to me, "You wasn't there. You can't prove what happened. You don't know who did it." I begin to explain that situation, but he cuts me off and walks away. A moment later, the girl that owns the other vehicle comes out and starts telling me that nobody knows what happened. She's laughing about it, eventually tells me that she owns the other car. Then anounces that she has a witness that "saw me not hit your car". Huh??
She tells me to take all of the photos I want, just tell it to her lawyer. I smile and say, "Okay".
Since she acted so goofy, and we've been having this problem with damage to the car, I decide to call the police. Now the business owner gets really angry with me. He blows off the cop, the car owner disappears. I show the cop what I've found, he takes photos. Runs the plate, and says, "OHHHH, I know that name." I ask if he has a tape-measure. He says, "Oh, good idea." We hold his tape-measure for each others photos, we talk about accident reconstruction. The damage on each car is centered at 29.75" off of the ground and is 1.5" wide (running along our fender and her tire holder). He talks to us, he talks to the owner of the other car. He mentions that if I take paint samples, have our lab do their thing and they match, that she will be cited for hit-skip, and he suggests that he might need to search her car. Suddenly she agrees that she might have done it, and offers her insurance info. But, she doesn't have the info with her, she'll get it for us tomorrow.
The car owner goes back into work, tells how she's being victimized by us, just because she hit our car, and the business owner suggest to my wife that she might be fired for causing so much trouble.
I suspect that it is going to get worse, before it gets better.
