A motorcyclist who was flung off his bike by a speeding motorist in a hit-and-run incident last weekend is seeking help to identify the culprit.
John Pace suffered a fractured collar bone and multiple bruises in a late-night incident which could have ended in far greater tragedy.
Mr Pace was driving home early on Saturday morning after closing his Paceville business when a speeding car zoomed past him as he was riding up Triq Mikelang Borg, past St Julian’s parish church.
He quite literally did not know what hit him.
There is little Mr Pace can do but patiently wait to recover.“I found myself on the ground, with my Piaggio scooter on top of me,” he recalled. “I looked up and could make out a car speeding away.”
Instead of stopping to help the injured biker, the mystery motorist hit the pedal to the metal and vanished into the night.
“My first concern was to get myself away from danger. I was lying on the ground in the dark, and I knew that if another car came speeding up the road I would end up being run over,” he recalled. “I honestly have no idea what sort of car hit me, let alone its number plate.”
As he hobbled to the pavement, a foreigner riding a motorbike stopped to give him a hand. Mr Pace somehow managed to ride his bike to his San Ġwann home – “it must have been the adrenaline” – before he got a ride to hospital, where doctors confirmed his collar bone was fractured.
The incident comes at a time when anger about road safety is bubbling. Just last week, a 53-year-old cyclist was killed in an early morning crash in Kappara, while two weeks ago an underage driver ran over a police constable in Luqa before fleeing the scene. He was apprehended a short while later and now faces attempted murder charges.
Mr Pace knows that the odds of police catching the motorist who sent him crashing to the ground are not on his side.
“It was 1.45am, there were no other motorists around and I can’t remember anything about the car,” he sighed. “Police are going to check the CCTV cameras of a supermarket just down the road, hopefully they’ll be visible on that.”
Mr Pace also has one other piece of evidence to help solve his painful puzzle: part of the offending vehicle’s side mirror, which he had the presence of mind to collect as he was leaving the crash site.
Three days after the event, the idea that somebody could leave him for dead in the middle of a road continued to sit uneasily with him.
“He left me lying there in the middle of the road,” he said. “Most people would stop to care for an injured animal, let alone a human being...” his voice trailed off.
Mr Pace’s brother Charles was just as upset.
“Hitting a motorcyclist is bad, but accidents happen. That’s life,” he sighed.
“But speeding off and leaving him there...what a world we are living in,” he sighed. “Where are our values?”
A shattered piece of side view mirror is all the evidence Mr Pace has of the incident.