The Pitt County Sheriff’s Office and the Highway Patrol have teamed up and are broadening outreach to find information that led to the hit and run death of 20-year-old Austin Baeza
The 20-year-old was struck and killed while walking along Highway 33 on August 18th of this year. The driver of the vehicle has never come forward.
The two law enforcement communities were out today reaching out to members in the Hispanic community near where the accident happened. The hopes are maybe someone with English speaking difficulties, may know what happened to Baeza.
"What we want to do is go out, we've got flyers made up. They're made up in Spanish, we've got several people here who can speak Spanish if we need an interpreter. That's why I encouraged everybody to come dressed down in plain clothes. We don't want to intimidate anybody, we're reaching out," said Pitt County Sheriff Neil Elks.
The reward for information has grown to $11,500. It’s something Christy Wallace with the Sheriff’s says is surprising there hasn’t been more informative tips.
"Normally when a reward is this high, we get a lot of tips and we have had lots of tips, but they haven't been tips that have led to the needed information. We believe that at this time in our community there are so many Spanish speaking people here that we need to be able to branch out to them too," said Wallace.
