THP looking for witnesses in license scam death
The Tennessee Highway Patrol needs your eyes and ears to help them solve a critical piece of the puzzle in the license fraud case here in Memphis.
Investigators want to know the timeline that lead up to the crash that killed Katherine Smith. She died in a mysterious car fire over the weekend, a fire that investigators say was arson. Smith's gold Acura Legend collided with a pole on Highway 72 just before one 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning. An interior fire killed Smith.
And now investigators want to hear from anybody who may have seen Smith or her car before the crash happened. "If she stopped and purchased any type of items or maybe stopped and used a public phone to talk to friends or contact someone, then we'd like to go back to that location and see what time she was there," said THP Captain Jimmy Erwin.
Smith, a license examiner, died before she could appear in Federal Court on charges she accepted money from five Middle Eastern men for fake Tennessee driver's licenses.
I've been wondering about that timeline, too. Earlier reports said she went off the road about 12:15. The last one I read said it happened about 12:45-1AM. In the middle of an emergency, things often get written down later, and time perception can be faulty. Nonetheless, there's almost an hour difference here. I hope they are asking around down in Mississippi, too.