Jonathan Lee Burgsteiner just wanted to participate in the “fun” activity of “owning the libs” and maybe get some online high-fives from terrible people with this Halloween tweet:
I’m sure there are better ways to spend your time than turning your kids into props by making them dress up as people they don’t know or care about, and putting them in blackface is worse.
Enter the hero of this story, @Chinchillazllla, who replied with this astonishing bit of information:
The tweet linked to a news story in the Hickory Record dated July 9, 2016: Granite Falls man charged in fatal hit-and-run in Hildebran. Burgsteiner was charged with felony hit-and-run after striking and killing Dalinette Trinidad Del Valle as she walked along a roadway in Catawba County, North Carolina. Del Valle had been hit by a vehicle with enough force to knock her off the road, where she rolled into a near-by ravine. Her belongings — a purse, shoes, and glasses, were found on the road. She died on impact. She had two children.
It turns out that Burgsteiner borrowed the car of his mother-in-law, Sharon Worley, and returned it with a broken headlight. When asked why he returned the vehicle with a broken headlight, he told his father-in-law that he’d hit a deer. The father-in-law investigated the spot where the Burgsteiner said the accident had taken place, and couldn’t find any evidence of a dead deer. Between this and the news story about a hit-and-run where the vehicle described sounded like theirs, Burgsteiner’s in-laws went to the police.
When his story didn’t add up, Worley came forward and told troopers she was concerned. The family asked investigators to look at their vehicle to see if it could’ve been involved in the deadly hit-and-run, according to [North Carolina State Highway Patrol Trooper] Gouge.
“The piece that was found at the scene matched up perfectly,” he said.
Burgsteiner continued to maintain that he thought he’d hit a deer and said he’d stopped, but Gouge said Del Valle’s shoes, purse and glasses were still in the roadway when a witness drove by the scene just after she was killed.
Upon being outed as someone who killed a woman, fled the scene, lied about it — and all in a borrowed car, to boot — Burgsteiner decided that discretion was the better part of valor and closed his Twitter account:
Burgsteiner’s trial started this summer, and apparently it’s being moved to Superior Court.
