LINCOLN, Maine — A woman turned herself in to police on Monday and was charged in connection with driving a Saturn sedan that hit a pedestrian on Saturday on Penobscot Valley Avenue, police said.
Brittany Goding, 31, of Lincoln was issued a summons for Class C leaving the scene of a personal injury accident, police said.
Goding came to the Lincoln Public Safety building after police appealed for the public’s help Monday in identifying the vehicle that struck a 19-year-old pedestrian. The man was walking southeast from the Bank of Maine on West Broadway toward Penobscot Valley Hospital when the accident occurred about 9:50 p.m., said Detective Mark Fucile, the Lincoln Police Department’s spokesman.
Goding told police that she was driving home in her 2002 Saturn sedan after working a double shift as a waitress at a West Broadway restaurant when she saw the man alongside the road, Fucile said.
“She claims she pulled away from him but that she heard like a bang. She thought he threw a rock at her vehicle or that she had gotten a flat tire,” Fucile said Monday.
The injured man reported suffering back and hip pain, and possibly a spinal injury, from the accident, Fucile said.
Darkness at that hour of night prevented the man from identifying the vehicle that struck him when he was about 100 feet from the bank. Investigators found at the scene a passenger-side rear-view mirror typically found on 1997 to 2002 Saturn sedans that came off Goding’s car when the collision occurred, Fucile said.
Goding, meanwhile, reported that she didn’t notice any damage to her vehicle when she arrived home. It dawned on her that she might have hit a pedestrian when her boyfriend told her on Sunday that rumor had it that an accident occurred on Penobscot Valley Road at about the time she was on it, Fucile said.
“Then she saw that her mirror was missing,” Fucile said.
The media reports and word from some of her friends on Monday also influenced Goding’s decision to come to the station. Goding was cooperative with police, bringing with her all of her motor vehicle documentation and leaving the Saturn at the public safety building, Fucile said.
Class C crimes carry punishments of as many as five years incarceration and a $5,000 fine.
Goding is due to appear at Penobscot Judicial Center in Bangor on March 17, Fucile said.