Police in Northern Virginia received an important lead from an unexpected source in a fatal hit-and-run in December.
Mary Wong, 63, was just a few yards from her home in Springfield when she was hit two days after Christmas.
“There’s a lot of people that care for her, and they’ve taken that away,” said her son, David Wong.
But police didn't have much to go on other than debris collected from the scene — fragments of a damaged headlight.
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“Our detectives decided, hey, we need to share this as kind of a last-ditch effort,” said James Curry of Fairfax County police.
Photos were posted on X, and eventually were seen by Jason Torchinsky, who co-founded The Autopian, a digital forum for car enthusiasts. He posted them, asking for help identifying the vehicle the fragments came from.
“Like when you see an actor in a movie and you can’t quite place where they’ve been before,” he said. “It’s that same kind of feeling. When you recognize it from somewhere, and you get enough car geeks working together on this kind of thing, and you can figure out almost anything.”
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His readers researched and concluded the car was likely a Dodge Avenger made between 2008 and 2014, Torchinsky said. They shared their findings with Fairfax County police, who released a stock photo of the type of car they're searching for.
“You kind of raise your eyebrow. Could it possibly be?” Curry said. “And then you see the two images, and like, Oh my gosh, it’s almost like a sure thing. But we still have to do an investigation. So, we have a new direction that we go with this investigation, it’s a positive lead, but that’s what we’ll continue to follow up on.”
The new lead provided much-needed hope for the Wong family.
“There’s a lot to hope for, and at this point we’re just hoping for some sort of miracle or some sort of chance that someone out there just happened to be there or happens to know something that no one else knows,” Wong said.
Fairfax County police say the new lead already generated tips. Anyone with information that could be helpful should call police.
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