- November 18, 2024
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Sheriff’s deputies arrived at a reported crash site at the intersection of West Matanzas Woods Parkway and US-1 Sunday morning and found an empty red Volkswagen Beetle sitting upside down on its roof, keys in the ignition and drops of blood on its shattered window.
Tire tracks showed that the car, a rental owned by a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had barreled west through the US-1 intersection, where it struck and mounted a median, then hit a palm tree and rolled over, according to a Sheriff's Office case report.
When deputies searched it, they found a driver’s license and debit card bearing the name of a local woman: Janel Walker.
A deputy drove out to Walker’s B-section house. But she’d been asleep, and neither she nor her 15-year-old daughter had driven the car the previous night, they told deputies, or had any signs of having been in a car crash, according to the report.
Whoever had crashed the Walkers’ rental car had done so after stealing the keys from their dining room table.
There were clues: A rear sliding door was open about an inch, and two lights in the house that Walker said had been off when she went to sleep had been turned on by an intruder.
Walker’s daughter told a deputy that sometime during the night, someone had opened her bedroom door and left it slightly ajar. She thought it was her mother, and went back to sleep, according to the report.
A deputy checked the items the thief had touched for fingerprints, but did not find any.
He took touch DNA samples from the table where the keys had rested and from a light switch the thief had turned on. Walker and her daughter both gave DNA samples, and deputies will submit the blood from the crash site for testing.
