Who sent anonymous text to victim's dad after Chilliwack hit-and-run?

Chilliwack, B.C. -

Five days after a hit-and-run driver left his daughter in a coma, Chilliwack’s Dan Pinto received a chilling text.

“I get a text message saying it wasn’t his fault. It was purely an accident,” said Pinto.

But the mystery of who sent that text and how they even knew Pinto’s number, remains unsolved.

On Oct. 13, 2021, Pinto’s daughter, Bernice Lorenz, was walking beside Keith Wilson Road when her life was forever changed.

“(I was) going to the neighbours' (house) and a car hit me,” said 56-year-old Lorenz, who spent nine months in the hospital and has almost no memory of what happened.

Her dad recalls searching for her in the dark when she didn’t come back from the neighbours' place.

“I started calling her name and every time I called her name, I hear this growling sound,” he said.

That growling sound would turn out to be his daughter’s desperate cries for help.

She’d been thrown about 100 feet and was found lying face-down in water at the bottom of a deep ditch.

Pinto said doctors didn’t think she would survive.

Bernice Lorenz spent nine months in the hospital and has almost no memory of what happened.

But Lorenz, who remembers hearing her dad’s voice in hospital, is a fighter.

With the help of a walker, she can slowly get around again. She’s relearned how to talk, though her dad says her speech remains significantly affected by a brain injury from that fateful night.

A year after the hit-and-run, the family is still looking for answers.

“We need closure,” said an emotional Pinto.

Despite the troubling text message he received, so far, the driver has not been arrested.

“We’re continuing to work diligently to provide answers,” said Sgt. Krista Vrolyk of the RCMP’s Upper Fraser Valley Regional Detachment.

“We are aware of that text message and have exhausted all investigative avenues … (and have) not been able to link a particular individual to that phone number,” said Vrolyk.

“We know that someone out there has information that is critical to our investigation … Whether it’s an auto body shop that performed some work in and around Oct. 13 of last year. The vehicle is believed to have front end damage of some sort. Maybe it’s a family or friend of an individual who has a vehicle that had unexplained damage around that time,” she said.

Lorenz, who is part of a day program at the Chilliwack Opportunity Society, has a message for the driver.

“Don’t hit anybody again.”