Police look to solve hit-and-run

SAUGUS ? More than three years ago, a hit-and-run driver on the Saugus Turnpike killed Kathleen M. O’Neil of Lynn and then fled the scene. Now Saugus Police are asking the public for help solving the case.?Someone knows what happened that day, and we need them to come forward,” Saugus Police Lt. Ronald Giorgetti said in a statement on Wednesday.Police responded to a report of a woman’s body in the median of Route 107 North in Saugus shortly before 1 a.m. on June 19, 2011. The victim was identified as O’Neil, who would be celebrating her 45th birthday this month.Police said the only clue they have in the investigation, and the clue may or may not be related to the fatal crash, is that a second car crash occurred approximately 50 yards away moments after witnesses saw O’Neil’s body.In the second crash, a 1996 black Nissan Pathfinder struck a tree after rolling over multiple times. Witnesses reported, however, they were sure the body was in the road before the crash.Witnesses described the Pathfinder’s occupants as two short Hispanic men who removed the license plates from the crashed vehicle and then fled.Police found one of the men in the nearby woods, and the owner of the vehicle surrendered to police the following day, police reported.Although the passenger initially told police he had fallen asleep before the crash and didn’t know what was happening, he later changed his story, according to Saugus Police.The passenger said he had been at the Lido nightclub drinking and asked two of the bar’s regulars for a ride home to Lynn, police said. The passenger said the vehicle was traveling too fast on Route 107 and started rolling over, police reported. The next thing he allegedly knew, he was being pulled from the car by strangers who told him to run or else he would be arrested by police.The passenger and driver both said they had the nothing to do with O’Neil’s death, however, and there was not enough evidence to charge them, Saugus Police said.