Lisa Wiley is not motivated by vengeance when she thinks about the person who killed her son in a hit-and-run incident in 2022. “I’m looking for justice,” she said, “but I’m also looking for the person who did this, for their soul to be saved.
“And if I met them,” she said, “I would give them a hug.”
Robert Lee Jenson, 40, was walking back to his mother’s Carmichael home from a food and liquor market on June 20, 2022. It was a few minutes after dusk on the longest day of the year, and the temperature was still in the high 80s as an early summer stretch of warm weather descended on the region.
Jenson crossed Fair Oaks Boulevard where it meets El Camino Avenue, an awkward intersection where two of the area’s busiest four-lane thoroughfares meet. There isn’t a crosswalk on the north side of the intersection, and Jenson may have walked diagonally to cross Fair Oaks Boulevard, his mother said.
Wiley woke up the next morning and her son wasn’t home. She called 911 and reported him missing. The police called her at 7 p.m. to tell her that her son had been found dead without his identification, his body discovered on the sidewalk in front of a small bus stop and an auto body shop on Fair Oaks Boulevard. He had been killed in a hit-and-run crash.
“He’ll never come to my door again and tell me he loves me,” she said.
Jenson’s life was not easy. His father died when he was a toddler. He and his wife were separated. He was recovering from an accident a few weeks earlier, when he rolled his truck while swerving to avoid a deer.
Now his mother is alone as she seeks justice. Unsatisfied with the investigation into her son’s killing, Wiley paid $2,500 to erect a billboard next to the auto body shop. The billboard offers an award and a plea for the driver’s penitence: “GOD SEE’S WHO’S INVOLVED,” it reads.
Read the full story here:
Exclusive: How Sacramento’s poorly-designed streets fuel a hit-and-run epidemic
____
