Reddit identifies a car part that helped solve a fatal hit-and-run (2018–2019)
2018–2019
After cyclist Susan Rainwater was killed in a 2018 hit-and-run in Washington State, a trooper posted a photo of a broken plastic fragment to Reddit's r/WhatIsThisThing; a user identified it as a part from a 1980s Chevrolet pickup, helping narrow the search to a suspect who later pleaded guilty.
What happened
On 9 August 2018, Susan Rainwater, a cyclist, was struck and killed in a hit-and-run on a state route near Eatonville, in Pierce County, Washington. Investigators recovered little physical evidence beyond a small broken plastic fragment left at the scene. A Washington State Patrol trooper publicized a photo of the fragment, which was reposted to Reddit's r/WhatIsThisThing community.
A Reddit user with vehicle-inspection experience identified the fragment as a headlight bezel from a late-1980s General Motors C/K-series pickup truck, recognizing a distinctive notch in the part. That identification helped narrow the field of possible vehicles. Investigators, working from this and other leads — including a separate tip and other investigative steps — located a matching vehicle with corresponding front-end damage.
Jeremy Simon, then 37, was arrested days after the collision while driving a 1986 Chevrolet K-10 pickup that showed damage consistent with the crash. He was charged with vehicular homicide, hit-and-run, and a drug-possession offense. On 30 January 2019 he pleaded guilty in Pierce County Superior Court and was sentenced under a Washington drug-offender alternative to a term reported at roughly 53.5 months.
The accurate framing matters: Reddit did not single-handedly solve the case. The platform's contribution was specific and bounded — identifying the make and era of the vehicle from a single part, which materially narrowed the search — while the arrest also rested on conventional police work. Several outlets nonetheless highlighted the case as a striking example of crowdsourced identification aiding a homicide investigation.
For the archive, the Rainwater case is a positive counterpoint to Reddit's sleuthing failures: a community oriented toward identifying obscure objects supplied a genuinely useful lead to law enforcement, and the case ended in a guilty plea and conviction rather than the misidentification of an innocent person. It documents the constructive end of Reddit's investigative culture.
Impact
The case is a documented instance of a Reddit community supplying a useful, bounded lead — identifying a vehicle from a single broken part — that helped narrow a fatal hit-and-run investigation ending in a guilty plea. It stands as a constructive counterpoint to the platform's high-profile sleuthing failures, showing crowdsourced identification aiding rather than derailing a case. It also illustrates the appropriate framing of such contributions: helpful, but one input among conventional police work.