He was lying in the middle of Guyer Avenue when the car came.
Thursday, October 15, 1:47 in the afternoon — broad daylight, a residential block in Wilmington. Somebody called police about a deceased individual in the 900 block of Guyer Avenue, and when officers got there they found him: a 38-year-old man, unresponsive in the roadway, gone.
Here’s what Wilmington Police say their investigation has determined since. The man was laying in the road when a vehicle struck him — and the driver kept going. Didn’t stop. Didn’t call. Left him there in the street and drove away.
Why he was lying in that road, police haven’t said. Maybe he fell. Maybe he was already hurt. Maybe something happened in the minutes before 1:47 PM that nobody’s explained yet. What is known is the part that matters most: he was a living man in that street until a car reached him, and the person behind the wheel made a choice. You do not strike a grown man with a car and not know it. The driver knew. And the driver chose the gas pedal.
Five days passed before the alert reached the public on Monday. The case sits with the Wilmington Police Department’s Special Operations Division Traffic Unit. Police have not yet released a description of the vehicle, and the man’s name has not been released. Further details, they say, will come as soon as possible.
So this is where Wilmington comes in — because a hit like this, at 1:47 in the afternoon, does not happen invisibly.
Cars that hit people carry the evidence with them. A cracked grille. A broken headlight. A dent that wasn’t there Thursday morning. Somebody in this city has a neighbor, a cousin, a customer at the body shop, who came home Thursday with fresh front-end damage and a story that doesn’t quite add up. Somebody on or near Guyer Avenue has a doorbell camera or a dash cam that caught a car moving too fast away from that block early Thursday afternoon. And somebody knows exactly whose car it was.
Go look. If you’re anywhere near the 900 block of Guyer Avenue, check your cameras for Thursday, October 15, early afternoon. If you work in a garage or a body shop and a car rolled in late last week with damage the owner couldn’t explain, think about this man. If you were driving anywhere near Guyer that day and saw something you’ve been trying to talk yourself out of reporting — stop talking yourself out of it.
Call Senior Corporal Brendan Marshall at (302) 463-8970. If you want to stay anonymous, Delaware Crime Stoppers takes tips at 1-800-TIP-3333. For the family and anyone affected, the WPD Victim Services Unit is at (302) 576-3622.
He has a name. Police haven’t released it yet, but he has one — and a family that, somewhere in Wilmington, got the worst knock on the door there is. He was 38 years old. He died in the middle of a city street in the middle of the day, and for five days the only person who knows the whole truth besides him is the one who drove away.
The driver has had five quiet days. That’s enough. Somebody talk.
Team Murphy Media has reached out to the Wilmington Police Department for any update and will update this story as soon as more is released.
Brought to you by Team Murphy Media.
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