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Adams v. Commonwealth12/20/1994
MEMORANDUM OPINION BY CHIEF JUDGE NORMAN K. MOON
Appellant, Gary Thomas Adams, was convicted of failure to immediately stop at the scene of a motor vehicle accident involving personal injury and of failure to report the accident to law enforcement authorities in violation of Code § 46.2-894. On appeal, he contends that the evidence was insufficient to support the conviction. We affirm the conviction.
At trial the following facts were adduced from the evidence. William Witcher was driving a tractor trailer eastbound on a road in Franklin County at 11:00 p.m. when he met an oncoming pickup truck that was approaching him head-on in his lane of traffic. Despite Witcher's attempts to avoid the oncoming vehicle, the two vehicles collided. Witcher's vehicle jackknifed, went off of the road, over an embankment, and came to rest so that the truck was not visible from the road. Witcher suffered a cut on his head and a leg injury from the incident.
Witcher was getting out of the truck when he heard someone on the road say " tractor trailer hit us and they didn't stop; it just kept going." Witcher yelled up the embankment, "You are just a damn liar. You hit me, and here I am." Passersby, who were on the road, heard Witcher's cries from below and helped him climb the embankment to the road. Witcher never saw the occupants of the pickup truck.
Samuel Walker, one of the three occupants of the pickup truck, testified that appellant was driving the pickup truck, that after the collision, they "looked down the road" and did not see the tractor trailer, that they thought the vehicle sideswiped the pickup truck and continued down the road, and that none of the occupants heard Witcher yell from down the embankment.
The three occupants of the pickup truck walked away from the scene of the accident, leaving the pickup truck. They never looked around for anyone else or searched for a vehicle. They went to a nearby residence and were there about an hour before the police arrived. Walker told the state trooper that the men left the scene of the accident because appellant did not have a driver's license.
The trooper testified that, although he could not see the tractor trailer from the road, tire pressure marks were found which "led from near where the pickup was across the road off onto the grassy shoulder and then the land was plowed up like this all the way down to the tractor and trailer." The trooper did not find any notes left by the pickup truck occupants. None of the pickup truck occupants reported the accident.
"On appeal, we review the evidence in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, granting to it all reasonable inferences fairly deducible therefrom." Martin v. Commonwealth, 4 Va. App. 438, 443, 358 S.E.2d 415, 418 (1987).
Code § 46.2-894 provides, in pertinent part:
The driver of any vehicle involved in an accident in which a person is . . . injured or in which an attended vehicle . . . is damaged shall immediately stop as close to the scene of the accident as possible without obstructing traffic and report his name, address, driver's license number, and vehicle registration number forthwith to the State Police or local lawenforcement agency, to the person struck and injured if such person appears to be capable of understanding and retaining the information, or to the driver . . . of the vehicle collided with . . . . The driver shall also render reasonable assistance to any person injured in such accident . . . .
In Herchenbach v. Commonwealth, 185 Va. 217, 220, 38 S.E.2d
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