It was still dark at the corner of Luck Lane and Highland Drive when you drove southbound through the intersection around 7 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 29, hit my mother with your white Toyota Rav4 Hybrid SUV and fled the scene.
Exactly one week later — on Friday, Nov. 5 — I retraced my mother’s steps. At 6:40 a.m. I left the front entrance of the community she called home, The Wentworth at East Millcreek, crossed 3300 South and followed the winding paths through Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park, passing a small pond near a well-lit pavilion with a gently swaying American flag, before finally arriving at the crosswalk.
It was still dark and chilly at 7 a.m. The intersection has no streetlight. A band of dawn illuminated the outline of the Wasatch Mountains to my left as I made my way west across Highland Drive. Warm tears rolled down my cold cheeks.
I made it to the other side. My mother did not. Around 10 feet from the safety of the curb, you struck her. Her body flew around 30 feet before landing in a heap on the road.
An individual doing morning custodial work at the University Federal Credit Union on the corner told me that when they drove north down Highland Drive on the morning of Oct. 29, they assumed the lump in the street was a bag of trash. Maybe filled with fall leaves.
It wasn’t until another vehicle spun a U-turn that they realized it was a body. A couple in that car called 911. My mother — miraculously still alive — was rushed to the hospital. Doctors operated for more than four hours before she was pronounced dead at 66-years-old.
As I wept at the intersection a week later, I searched for excuses for you. It was dark out. The intersection was poorly lit. The streetlight changes fast. You must walk quickly to cross before the orange hand stops blinking.
Sunlight crept over the horizon as I fought to give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you have a sick child or parent at home. Maybe you are undocumented and afraid. Maybe life has been cruel to you in ways I can’t imagine. Maybe you can’t take more bad news.
I knew that morning, as I do now, that no excuses, real or imagined, can bring my mother back to life.
Police identified your car — a white 2018-21 Toyota Rav4 Hybrid with damage to the front headlight or marker light. Despite it being a major thoroughfare in a major American city, the police have been unable to find out anything else.
Among the infinite tragedies buried within this tragedy is that although you ended her life, you never met my mother. I could fill every page in this newspaper for a year with stories of things she did for others. When she died, she had only begun to learn how to do nice things for herself. She had tickets to Andrea Bocelli the next day.
For the rest of us, the canyon you ripped in our hearts remains. The abundance of love and support we’ve received cannot fill it. My pulse races at crosswalks. I listen to “Con te partirò” on repeat. I wonder what I’ll tell my future children about their grandmother’s death.
I’m sure you have your own canyon. You drive cautiously now. You feel eyes on you. You can’t shake how a streak of cranberry sauce in a bowl reminds you of the blood you wiped off your bumper when you got home that morning.
My mother adored the holidays and the seasons. Her final social media posts were flush with fall colors. When I left the intersection, I sat for a while and listened to the delicate crunch of leaves falling atop each other in Wasatch Lawn. I understood why she loved walking there. No graveyard ever looked so gorgeous in the glow of an Autumn morning.
Every holiday season, my mother honored the tradition of going around the table and giving something we were thankful for that year. Please, to help repair the canyons in all of us, give us something to say to each other now. Give us someone to forgive.
Alex Dwyer
Alex Michael Dwyer is a writer living in Los Angeles and a native of Brian Head, Utah.
The Dwyer family is offering a reward of $10,000 for information leading to a conviction of the hit-and-run driver who killed their mother, Barbara Anne Dwyer, on Oct. 29. Please contact the Unified Police at 801-840-4000 if you have information and reference case No. 21-134792.