Police are still investigating a 23-year-old Black Diamond man tracked via the Auburn dealership that fixed his car after he allegedly struck a 60-year-old bicyclist last month and fled.
A judge set the man’s bail at $5,000 at his first appearance Oct. 19 at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent.
“We haven’t filed a charge yet, it’s still under investigation,” said Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the King County Prosecutor’s Office. “The case has not been submitted to our office.”
The Reporter is withholding the man’s name from publication because he has not been charged.
The victim, Barbara Jimenez, is recovering at home.
According to court information, Jimenez had been riding her bike along Southeast 288th Street in Black Diamond at about 1:30 p.m. Oct. 14 when a vehicle struck her from behind, pitching her onto the gravel and grass shoulder before leaving the scene.
Medics transported Jimenez to Valley Medical Center, where doctors treated her for a fractured nose and cheek, a concussion and multiple bruises and cuts.
The impact cracked Jimenez helmet in five places.
According to court papers, investigating officers spotted a silver passenger side mirror casing on the ground at the accident scene with the word “Kia,” and several part numbers on it.
Officers contacted the Kia dealership in Renton, from which they learned that the vehicle equipped with that mirror was a silver 2010 or 2011 Kia Forte.
Over the next three days investigating officers contacted every Kia dealership in King and Pierce counties, asking them to call 911 should a vehicle missing those parts show up.
Deputies got the break they had been looking for when the service department manager at the Auburn Valley-Kia Dealership called police about a damaged vehicle he’d seen in the shop matching the description of the car investigators were seeking.
Deputies arrested the man at the Auburn window installation business where he works.
According to court records, a few moments after investigators showed the man a television news clip about the accident, the man, head in hands, said, “Did I kill someone? Oh, my god, did I kill someone?”
He told investigators that he had been driving to his grandparents’ house that afternoon when he remembered that he needed to give his grandfather a receipt for medications he had bought.
When he reached into his glove box to pull out the receipt, he said, he took his eyes off the road. Just then, according to court documents, he heard a loud bang and realized he’d hit something with his car.
He told investigators until he saw the news clip he believed he had hit a mailbox. He said he panicked because he was driving with a suspended license. He did not look in the rearview mirror to see what he had hit, nor did he report the collision.
