Hottie

I made a thought provoking discovery last night while rummaging through pictures from 15 years ago. A photo from 2002 showed a street-side Descanso in memory of a 32-year old man killed at that spot. A lookup of that person’s name revealed he was run down by a 19-year old drunk driver. The driver was uninjured. One of the victim’s legs was severed. He died 4 hours later at a nearby hospital. What a shitty way to go.

A lookup of the driver’s name turned up several mentions of the incident, along with a number of mugshot websites that indicate she has since been arrested 4 times for violating terms of probation. It’s not stated in the records what led to those arrests, and despite any initial curiosity I don’t think I need to delve any further into the whole sorry mess.

Still, the details that jump out paint a surprisingly clear picture. At the time of the incident she was a pizza delivery person. Her latest employ seems to be that of a cashier at a gas station. Through these records I can determine exactly where that gas station is located.

In three of the 5 mugshots the woman is smiling. In two of them she is positively beaming. Only in the first one, when she was arrested for DUI manslaughter, does she have something of a deer in the headlights look about her.

I thought mugshot websites had been blackballed by the search engines on account of how they basically function as an extortion racket. Photos and criminal records, once posted, can typically only be deleted if a fee is paid to whoever owns the sites. These mugshot website operators continue to get away with this business model on account of the information’s status as public domain. I find them morally repugnant but given the attitude this country has toward criminals it seems like it would be hard to gain enough activist traction to have the sites unplugged.

One site I found today has a cynical feature I don’t remember seeing when last I explored mugshot websites a few years ago. Site visitors are given a list of tags they can add to the photos. Among the tags are WINO, SCARY, and WTF. This woman’s photo is tagged HOTTIE. She is not unattractive but I wonder if she didn’t add that tag herself.

The victim, a US Army veteran, had been arrested 2 years earlier for driving with a suspended or revoked license. That relatively minor blemish on his record might explain why he was riding a bike at the time of the incident.

I looked into those websites a few years ago when, through circumstances too labored to detail, it was revealed that someone sitting in jail for sex crimes had used my name as one of his many aliases. It seemed curious to me because the names on his long list of aliases were almost all obvious derivations of his real name. So if he was named John Jones then the aliases were something like Johnny Jones, John Johnson, Jon Jones, etc. His list of a few dozen aliases that derived from his real moniker ended with my name, which is not even remotely similar to his. That was the last alias he used before being arrested.

I will never know but I have some reason to believe that individual was known to me many years ago. We started out friendly enough, our connection based mostly on how we both grew up in Tampa. But over time he got weird on me, offering to go over to my mother’s place to see how she was doing and making it all too clear that he knew exactly where she lived. I thought I had gotten away from him in the summer of 1996 but when I encountered his mugshot records all those years later it turned out he had been arrested right around the time he disappeared from the Internet. That was an unsettling crossing of paths, even if it is entirely possible it was accidental.