L.A.'s Bloody Hit-and-Run Epidemic [LA Weekly]


The last thing Marie Hardwick remembers from the morning of Sunday, March 25, as she legally crossed Wilshire Boulevard is glancing through the windshield of a shiny black sports car — into the expressionless eyes of a man who, milliseconds later, shot his sedan like a bullet into her delicate frame, leaving Hardwick crumpled and broken in the crosswalk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
X-rays show the injuries of hit-and-run victim Marie Hardwick.
COURTESY OF MARIE HARDWICK
X-rays show the injuries of hit-and-run victim Marie Hardwick.
X-rays show the injuries of hit-and-run victim Marie Hardwick.
COURTESY OF MARIE HARDWICK
X-rays show the injuries of hit-and-run victim Marie Hardwick.
The pretty young Eastside jewelry artist had just emerged from a LACMA screening of Christian Marclay's experimental and striking 24-hour filmThe Clock, described by The New Yorker as "a seamless transition between reality and fantasy." Right around the 2 a.m. mark, when Hardwick stepped out, the film, made of hundreds and hundreds of snippets from other films, had begun to morph into a chaotic, sleep-deprived nightmare world.
Those horrors spilled out into the intersection of Spaulding Avenue and Wilshire, where, as a "walk" signal flashed overhead, a black BMW hit Hardwick so hard that her bottom row of teeth was knocked out, her jaw snapped apart like a puppet's, both her kneecaps shattered and the bones in both legs broke into pieces. One femur was split in five places.

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