"I saw a man driving, he ran out of the car. [...] He took his dog and walked away. I was driving and there was another car right in front of me. Well, it looks like the man had been drinking." Milēna, an eyewitness, told Latvian Television.
Juta, who lives nearby, also saw the man through her window. When she went out into the street, she noticed the accident.
"It was no joke, my one-month-old son had been startled and was crying," Juta recalled. "He [the driver] beelined. I didn't understand what had happened. Well, okay, a man is running, maybe there's someone after him, but this is salty, yes..."
A ticket left on the windscreen of the crashed car shows that the driver had already been fined by the municipal police for parking in the green zone shortly before the incident.
The State Police said that the identity of the driver who caused the accident had been established on Tuesday morning. Two administrative proceedings have been initiated and the driver's license could be revoked.
Around 3,000 drivers who cause accidents in the Rīga region flee the scene during the year. Residents of the neighborhood who gathered stressed that the driver was under the influence of alcohol, but it may now be difficult for the police to prove.
Police can determine whether a driver was under the influence of alcohol in various ways, said Juris Jančevskis, head of the State Police Response Department:
"It depends on the individual characteristics of each person, and so there is no such thing as a single recipe that can be applied to the specific time when this alcohol leaves the body in a particular case. Of course, it depends on the amount of alcohol consumed, but also on the individual characteristics of each person."
In the first six months of this year, more than 1,600 drunk drivers were arrested.
