California Highway Patrol officers have located and seized the vehicle believed to have been involved in last week’s fatal hit-and-run of a 17-year-old girl on Interstate 5 in Woodland.
Investigators also have interviewed a “person of interest” connected with the brown 1998 Buick Park Avenue, but whether that person was at the wheel of the car when it hit Claudia Marie Gonzalez early Friday morning remains to be seen.
No arrests had been announced as of Tuesday evening.
CHP Officer Bryan Konvalin said his agency received anonymous tips that led officers to the Buick, found Monday night at an auto dismantling yard near Richards Boulevard in Sacramento with damage to the vehicle’s left side.
“It looks like the damage matches” what the suspect’s car would have sustained in the 12:34 a.m. incident, which occurred after Gonzalez, a Woodland resident, ran from another car into the northbound I-5 traffic lanes near County Road 103, Konvalin said.
The CHP reported Monday that Gonzalez may have been the victim of a sexual assault while attending a party in West Sacramento earlier that night, and became upset to the point that the driver of the car she was in pulled over to the side of the road.
That driver, a 38-year-old man who has not been identified, came to Gonzalez’s aid after she was struck in the freeway’s fast lane, but she died at the scene of multiple blunt-force injuries, according to Yolo County coroner’s officials.
Meanwhile, authorities continue to probe both the alleged sexual assault and the hit-and-run, with investigators interviewing numerous witnesses and tracking down possible surveillance camera footage from businesses near the collision scene in their search for suspects.
Anyone with information is urged to call the Woodland CHP office at 530-662-4685.
“It’s not going real fast, but at least it’s still going,” Konvalin said of the investigation, mindful of other fatal pedestrian collisions in Yolo County whose trails have since gone cold.
They include the Jan. 21, 2012, fatal hit-and-run of UC Berkeley student Vladimir Debabov, 21, who was killed while walking in the traffic lanes of northbound Highway 113 north of County Road 29.
Konvalin said Debabov had attended a party on Gibson Road in Woodland that night and was on his way to a friend’s house in Davis when a vehicle — believed to be white with a front end low to the ground, such as a sports car — hit him just before 4 a.m.
More than a year earlier, on Oct. 15, 2010, someone fatally struck West Sacramento resident Herbert Lee Stout on southbound Highway 113 south of Gibson Road. A passerby discovered Stout’s body shortly after 3 a.m., several hours after the victim had been released from the Yolo County Jail.
Evidence collected at the scene, which Konvalin said included a piece of a light lens, suggested that a big rig or other large truck hit Stout sometime after midnight.
Like Friday’s incident, both fatalities occurred during the early morning hours, when few people are out to observe valuable details that can aid the law-enforcement investigation.
“Late at night, no witnesses, you don’t get a whole lot,” Konvalin said. This time, he added, investigators got a break.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter @laurenkeene