Two days after crash was publicly reported, NC auditor has yet to address incident
Two days after it was revealed that North Carolina State Auditor Beth Wood had been charged by Raleigh police last month for allegedly fleeing the scene of a crash, Wood has yet to publicly address the incident.
On Wednesday night, several media outlets reported that Wood was facing a hit-and-run misdemeanor charge, and an infraction for unsafe movement. Online court records indicated that Wood was scheduled to appear in Wake County court on Jan. 26.
Since then, The News & Observer has reported that a state-owned vehicle assigned to Wood was involved in the crash that occurred on the night of Dec. 8, near the intersection of West Hargett and South Salisbury streets downtown. A police report obtained by The N&O confirmed that the 2021 Toyota Camry assigned to her by a division of the Department of Administration was the car police found abandoned at the scene of the crash.
Wood was formally charged by Raleigh police on Dec. 12, four days after the incident occurred, according to a copy of the citation issued to her.
In another report obtained by The N&O, this one filled out by Wood and submitted on the same day, Dec. 12, to an accident services company used by state government, Wood reported that, “I made a sharp sudden turn and struck a parked vehicle.”
The N&O contacted Wood multiple times Wednesday night and throughout the day on Thursday, but didn’t receive a response. A spokesperson for the State Auditor’s office told The N&O the office had no comment.
Photos reported by WRAL on Friday show a dark-colored sedan slammed into the front left side of a white sedan parked on the side of South Salisbury Street, and was partially suspended in the air, with the vehicle’s rear right-hand side lifted up off the ground. The photos appear to match a description of the crash scene written by a responding police officer, who wrote that Wood’s car “overrode up onto the hood” of the parked vehicle.
When police arrived at the scene, they found the engine of Wood’s vehicle running, and the driver “appeared to have fled,” the officer wrote.
Bystanders reported crash in 911 calls
By the time an officer responded to the scene, there were no witnesses around, but there was surveillance video available, police reported.
Before that, however, bystanders who came across Wood’s car slammed into the parked car called 911 and reported it to police. The calls, three of them in total, all came in between 9:20 p.m. and 9:24 p.m.
“A car is on top of another car,” a man reported in one of the calls, later telling the dispatcher “it’s a black car on top of a white car.”
Another man called 911 and reported: “There’s a white car that’s parked and there’s a black sedan, a Toyota Camry, that just appears to have run into the other car, and there’s nobody in either vehicle.”
In the third call, a woman tells the dispatcher that one of the cars is on top of the other, “not completely, but two of the wheels are no longer on the ground. The other two are on the ground, and the car is on, and nobody is in it.”
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This story was originally published January 20, 2023 at 1:15 PM.
