Sacramento hit-and-run drivers leave staggering death toll, Bee investigation reveals
Debbie Colquitt is captive to the memories of that night, living in the space between reality and a dream she can’t shake.
She orders a three-piece fish and chips meal for her dad, his favorite dish from his favorite spot in Elk Grove. At the dinner table, dad wishes her mother a happy 49th wedding anniversary; the words take a minute to register for her mom, Shirley, whose dementia is becoming worse. Still, there are laughs. Everyone is happy.
Dad says he wants to head to Sam’s Club for some shopping. Colquitt’s parents are preparing for their annual RV trip to Yuma, Ariz. With mom getting sicker, Colquitt knows this could be the last time they head south for the winter.
“Wait until tomorrow,” she tells her dad. “Just relax for tonight.”
But at 85 years old, Edward Villasenor is a strong, energetic and proud man. He wants to shop tonight. He goes outside to start the car and comes back to the house. “You need anything?” he asks. No, dad. We have everything we need.
Three minutes later comes the sound of a terrible thud out front. Did someone hit a cow? Maybe a horse got loose from the ranch across the street? That happens sometimes on this part of Waterman Road, a two-lane drive leading from the Elk Grove sprawl to this rural section of Sacramento County.
Colquitt’s heart starts to hurt. She looks outside and sees nothing. But she feels it. She goes back out and sees her dad’s car door is open, the keys are in the ignition. The garbage cans are at the end of the driveway. Dad must have gone out to grab them, she thinks, so she walks out to the edge of the grass, stopping just short of the road.
That’s where a police officer approaches her.
“You have to go back,” he tells her.
“But that could be my dad out there,” she pleads.
Police tape is being hung. Waterman Road is blocked to traffic. An officer returns holding a wallet. She knows immediately that her father is gone.
“It was so hard for me to see,” she says now, more than three years later. She is sitting in the living room where she heard that terrible sound. There are photos on the walls of her parents after they were married, and one of Edward as a child dressed in a military uniform. Every few minutes, there is the faint rolling hum of a vehicle speeding down Waterman Road.
Edward Villasenor was killed in front of his home by someone driving a red SUV, shortly after 6 p.m. on Nov. 7, 2019. His body was dragged 273 feet, the impact so severe that investigators found radiator fluid on his body.
The driver kept going. They didn’t stop. They didn’t call for help.
Villasenor was one of more than 140 people killed by hit-and-run drivers in Sacramento County since 2018, a staggering death toll that is by far the highest in Northern California or the Central Valley. More people were killed in Sacramento County by drivers who fled the scene than in Orange County — the sixth-most populous county in the nation — and 31 people here died in hit-and-run crashes last year, the highest number going back at least a decade, according to a Sacramento Bee analysis of local and state law enforcement records, as well as records kept by the Sacramento coroner.
A vast majority of cases go unsolved. Arrests are made in roughly 10% of hit-and-run crashes nationwide, studies show, and in cases in which an arrest is made, it is often made quickly or when the driver turns themselves in.
Anguished families erect billboards and plead for witnesses to come forward. They create email tip lines and reward funds. But most have concluded that justice will never be theirs, that the police have moved on to investigating crimes that receive more public attention, that they have been forgotten.
Villasenor was raised in an orphanage. He owned a hamburger stand as a young adult before settling into landscaping, eventually running his own business and helping to build dozens of parks in the Sacramento region. He took his children to Disneyland and to the Yucatan for summer vacations. His family never wanted for anything.
“He was an outstanding man,” Colquitt said. “He was a good father.”
Three years after her father’s death, Colquitt writes down the license plates of every red SUV she sees. She checks for broken headlights or damage to the front end, and she often calls the police if she thinks there’s a chance it’s the vehicle that killed her dad.
“We’ve heard about so many (hit-and-runs) and it breaks my heart every time,” she said. “The people out there that are going through this … You live day by day, hoping for justice that never comes.”
Why drivers flee a crash scene
Lisa Wiley is not motivated by vengeance when she thinks about the person who killed her son. “I’m looking for justice,” she said, “but I’m also looking for the person who did this, for their soul to be saved.
“And if I met them,” she said, “I would give them a hug.”
Robert Lee Jenson, 40, was walking back to his mother’s Carmichael home from a food and liquor market on June 20, 2022. It was a few minutes after dusk on the longest day of the year, and the temperature was still in the high 80s as an early summer stretch of warm weather descended on the region.
Jenson crossed Fair Oaks Boulevard where it meets El Camino Avenue, an awkward intersection where two of the area’s busiest four-lane thoroughfares meet. There isn’t a crosswalk on the north side of the intersection, and Jenson may have walked diagonally to cross Fair Oaks Boulevard, his mother said.
Wiley woke up the next morning and her son wasn’t home. She called 911 and reported him missing. The police called her at 7 p.m. to tell her that her son had been found dead without his identification, his body discovered on the sidewalk in front of a small bus stop and an auto body shop on Fair Oaks Boulevard. He had been killed in a hit-and-run crash.
“He’ll never come to my door again and tell me he loves me,” she said.
Jenson’s life was not easy. His father died when he was a toddler. He and his wife were separated. He was recovering from an accident a few weeks earlier, when he rolled his truck while swerving to avoid a deer.
Now his mother is alone as she seeks justice. Unsatisfied with the investigation into her son’s killing, Wiley paid $2,500 to erect a billboard next to the auto body shop. The billboard offers an award and a plea for the driver’s penitence: “GOD SEE’S WHO’S INVOLVED,” it reads.
It seems like an act of pure evil — driving away after running over a pedestrian without stopping to help. Yet the decision to flee from a traumatic event in which another human being has lost their life is likely rooted more in psychology than a driver’s penchant to kill.
A fearful or traumatic experience such as striking a pedestrian with a car activates the brain’s amygdala, which leads the driver to either fight, flee or freeze, said Sharon Furtak, a behavioral neuroscientist and professor at California State University, Sacramento.
“Instead of concentrating on who they hit and what their condition is, they are in a moment of fighting intense fear and concentrating on how it’s going to impact them,” Furtak said. “And if they have any background where having police involvement is going to be a problem, that is going to make them focus on an innate response of self preservation.”
Julia Griswold, a researcher with the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center at the University of California, Berkeley, helped lead a study that examined 10 years of pedestrian deaths. Her research and other studies show that drivers responsible for deadly hit-and-runs were likely to be young men with prior traffic violations or a license suspension. When drivers were caught, “positive blood content (for alcohol) and a prior DUI significantly increased the risk of leaving the scene,” Griswold said.
Drivers were also less likely to flee when their victims were “very young or very old,” Griswold said. Of the 107 victims in Sacramento County over the past five years whose identity and age is known, very few were under the age of 20 or older than 75.
And given that so many drivers in fatal hit-and-run crashes remain free, “the likelihood of engaging in the behavior again is going to be increased,” Furtak said. It’s similar to a child getting away with consistently bad behavior because they haven’t been punished.
“Some of these hit-and-runs, it may not be their only time,” Furtak said. “It’s basic reinforcement learning. If you flee the scene and don’t get caught and there’s never been a consequence, that behavior has been reinforced and it’s likely to happen again.”
Investigators run into some of the same challenges when trying to find those responsible for a fatal hit-and-run crash as they do when investigating a gang shooting or other violent crime.
“Oftentimes there’s just a lack of witnesses, and when there are witnesses, there’s a reluctance of those witnesses to speak up because they feel like there might be repercussions,” said Officer Margarito Mezo with the California Highway Patrol.
When there are witnesses to a crash, a new California law that went into effect on Jan. 1 could help law enforcement find the driver. A bill authored by Assemblyman Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, revived the state’s dormant Yellow Alert system, which allows the California Highway Patrol and CalTrans to broadcast license plate numbers and descriptions of vehicles involved in hit-and-run crashes on freeway digital signs, similar to the Amber Alert system.
Through May 15, however, the Yellow Alert system has been used just once, helping to apprehend a hit-and-run driver in Los Angeles County, according to the California Highway Patrol.
“The alert system has been particularly effective for children who have been taken in custody disputes and kidnappings,” Patterson said. “We just thought it was a good idea. I wish it was being used more.”
How can hit-and-runs be prevented?
In many cases, hit-and-run drivers disappear into the night without anyone seeing them. And even when there are witnesses, investigators often have little to work with.
That was the case when the driver of a truck struck and killed John Saelee as he was riding his bicycle home with a friend from an evening shift at a Panda Express in Elk Grove. It was nearly 11 p.m. on April 21, 2022, and the pair were careful to ride in the northbound bike lane of Elk Grove Florin Road, a five-lane artery cutting through the sprawl of a booming suburb where cars often speed.
As Saelee approached Bridalsmith Drive, he was struck by what investigators described as a white work truck, possibly a Ford pickup. The right side passenger mirror of the truck was found at the scene.
Saelee died three days later.
Monica Saelee, John’s sister, said her brother’s friend told police that the truck was coming from the opposite direction as the pair of cyclists, swerving across the road. The driver slowed down after striking John, then sped off as his friend approached the truck, trying to read the license plate.
“I just think it’s super messed up that he didn’t take responsibility,” she said of the driver. “I would say a million things to him, but none of them are appropriate.”
Flooded by grief, Saelee’s parents left the city they had called home for more than 25 years one month later and moved to Oklahoma.
“They have been trying to live on and cope with it and stay out of that depression,” Monica Saelee said. “But they needed a fresh start. They just wanted to get away from California.”
California has far more lenient penalties for those convicted of leaving the scenes of deadly crashes than some other states. And recent efforts to increase the penalties have been killed by the state legislature.
Those convicted of killing someone in California can face sentences of up to four years. Hit-and-run drivers in some states, including Nevada and Connecticut, could be imprisoned for up to 20 years, according to data from the American Automobile Association.
A law proposed in California authored by Patterson would have increased the prison sentences judges could hand out for those convicted of deadly hit-and-run crashes. Gavin’s Law was named after beloved Clovis Unified vice principal Gavin Gladding, who was killed in a hit-and-run crash in 2018. Police said the driver had fled the scene to avoid a DUI arrest and was found to have hidden evidence of the crash.
The driver was sentenced to three years in prison and was released after 13 months. Had he remained at the scene and been determined to be drunk, he likely would have been sentenced to far longer.
“We’re trying to close that perverse loophole in the law,” Patterson said. “If they find an individual was likely impaired, hid evidence, tried to get others to cover it up and left the scene without giving aid, then it would be a judge’s discretion to add two or four or maybe six years to a sentence.”
The bill passed the state’s Assembly public safety committee in March, but failed to pass out of the pivotal appropriations committee last month. That was the third time the bill has failed since Patterson first introduced it in 2019.
While longer prison sentences bring a stronger sense of justice to victims’ families, some experts say harsher penalties will have a limited impact on preventing hit-and-run crashes and argue government officials should focus more energy on increasing pedestrian and cyclist safety.
Griswold, the Berkeley researcher, said it’s unlikely drivers even know what a state’s penalties are when calculating whether to flee the scene of a fatal crash.
“My personal opinion is that I don’t think having steeper consequences for hit-and-runs is the way to go,” Griswold said. “Preventing that crash in the first place, that’s the most important thing and designing a transportation system where severe and fatal injuries do not happen.”
That may never happen on thoroughfares such as Elk Grove Florin Road, in essence a mini expressway, its lanes of traffic serving thousands of commuters who each day speed past walled-off subdivisions and strip malls. The Sacramento region is carved into pieces by other dangerous roads: Stockton Boulevard, Florin Road, Watt Avenue.
Even on Waterman Road, where for long stretches the landscape is so deserted the Sierra Nevada are in view, someone taking the garbage cans inside after a family dinner isn’t safe from Sacramento’s hit-and-run epidemic.
Colquitt sits on the edge of her bed at night. The weight of what her family has endured is impossible to control. She cares for her mother, who is now bedridden. She must constantly console her granddaughter, who was barely a toddler when Edward Villasenor was killed but appears to remember that night.
She knows the number: 273 feet. That’s how far her father was dragged by that red SUV. 273 feet.
“I always think, what if they stopped?” she said, her thoughts now on the driver. “What if he stopped when he first hit him? He might still be alive.”
She is crying now, controlled by the memories once again.
“If they had stopped,” she said, “he’d probably be alive today.”
