Mar. 3—Elisabeth Dunn was known as an early riser, someone who could often be found walking in her Albuquerque neighborhood hours before the sun rose.

One such morning in 2021, the 45-year-old was found lying on the sidewalk along Girard SE, near Gibson. She was cold to the touch and half-naked, her jeans, hoodie and shoes strewn around the road.

“My sister was hit so hard, so hard, that her body flew and hit the brick wall and bounced off of it,” Kara Dunn told the Journal. “It just tore all of her clothes off, that impact.”

A woman who heard the crash and found the body was traumatized and crying hysterically. She had seen Dunn walking moments earlier.

The driver who hit her was long gone.

Dunn, a mother and grandmother, was one of 20 people fatally struck in a hit-and-run crash in 2021 in the Albuquerque area. Since 2017, at least 52 pedestrians have been killed by a driver who fled the scene.

Sgt. James Burton of the Albuquerque Police Department’s Fatal Crash Unit said many of the cases go unsolved, often due to a lack of cameras or grainy footage.

He said sometimes they can only identify the car type, recalling a recent case with the common Honda Accord. Burton said they searched for additional camera angles for days but couldn’t get any more details on the vehicle.

“Eventually, I have to come to a point where I have to tell the family, ‘The odds of us finding this guy is pretty low,'” he said.

For that reason, Burton said, solving hit-and-runs is “hit or miss.”

He said the city is planning “a pretty significant increase” in traffic cameras that could help capture hit-and-run offenders. And over the past three years, Burton said, camera expansions and Crime Stoppers tips have made it easier.

“If I can pull a license plate, my odds of finding you are incredibly high,” he said.

In October 2021, Kara Dunn didn’t like the odds.

Immediately, she said she felt, “I couldn’t trust the cops, basically, to do their job. And anyway, I was just really persistent, really persistent.” So when a work trip took her from her home in Tucson to White Sands, she made a detour through Albuquerque.

She walked the neighborhood, posted flyers, identified possible cameras and even spoke with a witness. She went on KOB-TV to ask for help and wrote letters to the Albuquerque police chief and a supervisor in the Traffic Unit.

“I just kept on and on and on,” Dunn said. “… Part of it is a curse, and that’s my extreme tenacity.”

Then she received an anonymous call: A man had overheard a woman talking about how her grandson had fatally struck a woman.

“I immediately got a hold of the detective and gave him all the information,” Dunn said.

It took another two years of pressing, she said, but Pablo Herrera was charged in November with leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death. The 26-year-old, who has two prior DWI arrests, has already had two court hearings postponed.

His attorney could not be reached.

“I’m relieved and frustrated at the same time,” she said. “And even when I look at the penalty in New Mexico, for a hit-and-run, it’s like a slap on the wrist.”

Even now, Dunn worries about the case’s outcome — the car has never been found and the grandmother won’t cooperate. She said her sister’s husband couldn’t cope with the loss and, in 2022, killed himself.

Dunn said her sister, who could spend a whole day in a library and loved science, was just getting started. Among other things, she wanted to see a SpaceX launch up close.

“Overall, she loved life and didn’t want to die,” Dunn said. “She had visions of her future that she was working on … to be part of her grandchildren’s life, her daughters and her grandchildren.”

She added, “That’s the main thing — she wanted to see all this to the end.”