One year after car crashed into home, search for driver ends

Citing a lack of sufficient evidence, police have closed their investigation into who crashed a car into Schaumburg home just over a year ago and then fled the scene, leaving the vehicle behind in a resident's living room.

Fingerprints recovered from the outside of the car were insufficient to determine that the person they belonged to had been driving the car, Schaumburg police Lt. Shawn Green said.

The crash occurred about 3:20 a.m. Oct. 4, 2015, when the driver of a 2013 Nissan Sentra heading south on the 1000 block of Springinsguth Road lost control and crashed through a fence and then the side of the home's garage before plunging into the living room.

Family members were home but safely elsewhere in the residence. By the time they came out to investigate the crash, the driver had fled, leaving the damaged Nissan behind.

The gas line to the house was severed in the crash, forcing first-responders to quickly evacuate adjacent homes. The gas supply to the house was cut off until repairs could be made, and structural damage left it uninhabitable until repairs were completed just before the holidays last year.

Police checked with area hospitals after the crash but didn't find anyone who seemed to have been injured.

Investigators located the registered owner of the car within days, but no one who would accept responsibility for being behind the wheel. Blood samples and other evidence was recovered from the car in hopes it would identify the driver.

But the only fingerprints found were on the outside of the vehicle. The Cook County state's attorney's office did not consider that sufficient evidence to charge the person and would not approve a warrant for that person to provide DNA samples, Green said.

Schaumburg police Monday initially told the Daily Herald that a person of interest had been found in the crash. But that person of interest is someone linked to a more recent garage crash on Oct. 17 of this year, Green later said.

On that day, a driver had struck a garage on the 1300 block of Forestdale Court before getting his vehicle free and driving off. The same driver then struck a tree on the 200 block of South Braintree Drive nearby and was taken for medical treatment.

The driver, who has not yet been charged, is still recovering and was the only person injured in either collision, Green said.