Yuen: Her leg is gone after a hit-and-run. Will the driver turn himself in?

Moments after Andrea Lee was catapulted from her motorcycle, she lay on the ground alone like a crumpled bird. Pain seared through her right leg. Lee assumed it would be obvious to anyone, let alone the driver of the SUV that struck her, that she was badly hurt. She wondered, why is no one coming?

Then it dawned on her. The person who struck her with his SUV outside the Sam’s Club in Maple Grove would never come. Lee was the latest victim of a hit-and-run.

Weeks have passed, and Lee’s leg is amputated. And the driver is still nowhere to be found.

Hit-and-run collisions are not rare. About 3,600 resulted in injury from 2020 to 2024 in Minnesota, and in 53 incidents, someone was killed. We rarely hear about the hit-and-run crashes that don’t result in death, and yet they can permanently alter a person’s life.

What is unusual about this case is Lee’s matter-of-fact response to her injuries and her concern for her perpetrator. After doctors severed her leg, she wrote a letter to the driver, whom she addressed as “Dear Neighbor,” imploring him to come forward — not for her sake but for his own.

The man behind the wheel of the black Dodge Durango couldn’t have known that the 52-year-old woman he hit was a veteran marathon runner capable of radical empathy. Out of all the people he could have turned into a statistic that day, Lee is known in her community as a persistent advocate for those in need. She is the director of operations and “neighboring” at her north Minneapolis church, where she oversees a food pantry and other community resources.

“If you hadn’t left that morning, I could have told you that we’d get through this,” Lee wrote in her letter, which her husband shared and others reshared on Facebook. “I would have let you hold my hand.”

Seated on a living room sofa with her husband in their Plymouth split-level, the former middle-school teacher explained that if the driver had called 911 and sat with her, she would have known it was truly an accident, not a criminal act. She also would have known that he saw her humanity.

“I would have wanted someone to be there for me in that moment, even that person who hit me, to reassure me that help is on the way,” she said.

Someone did help, a woman who worked at the gas station. She told Lee not to look at her mangled leg and covered it with her own jacket.

To understand Lee, you must know one thing. A Korean adoptee and only child, she had a troubled upbringing while growing up in suburban Chicago. Her father was likely on the autism spectrum, and she said her mom had borderline personality disorder — a dicey mix. Seeing her mom abruptly cut off ties to those close to her, Lee grew to become more relentless in her relationships with people.

Through her work at Sanctuary Covenant Church, nestled at a historically crime-plagued corner in north Minneapolis, she befriended a homeless man who had struggled with addiction. He got clean and secured housing but relapsed and disappeared. Lee resolved to track him down, banging on the door of his Robbinsdale apartment.

The other thing about Lee? She has a supernatural tolerance to pain, whether physical or mental.

“She gave birth to both of our kids without making a peep,” said her husband, Phil. “I asked the nurse, ‘When do women start screaming like they do on TV?’ And she said, ‘About four hours ago. I’ve never seen this without an epidural.’”

So Phil didn’t grasp the gravity of his wife’s injuries when the gas station worker called him from Lee’s cell phone. He could hear Lee calmly speaking in the background.

At the hospital, doctors explained that her ankle exploded in the crash, and pieces of her foot bone were missing. They could save the foot by performing a dozen surgeries, but it would never function the way it used to.

Lee, who has completed five major marathons and had just entered the lottery to run the one in Berlin next year, wouldn’t accept that.

“It was a no-brainer,” she told me. “I could see the path: Get amputated leg. Then get prosthetic leg. Then get running blade. Run the Berlin Marathon. Be the biggest badass people have ever seen.”

Around 8 a.m. on Oct. 2, Lee was riding her motorcycle to get gas at Sam’s Club. At a four-way stop in front of the store, she remembers slowing but not fully stopping before she made a left turn. The driver of an oncoming black Dodge Durango still had some distance to go before the intersection, she figured. But he blew the stop sign, struck her motorcycle and sent her flying, she said. Lee never lost consciousness.

Maple Grove police are still working to identify the driver, who they say is an adult male, and are sifting through video footage from the incident. An investigator told Lee that the driver got out of the vehicle and looked at her before he fled the scene.

Even as the weeks tick by, hit-and-runs can be solved. Someone will hear about this crash, and a newer-model Durango with damage to its front end might come to mind. New security video footage could surface. Anyone who knows something about the case should call Maple Grove police at 763-494-6123.

In Lee’s imagination, the driver is, like her, married with kids. The secret is rotting his insides and is now tormenting his spouse and will haunt his children. If Lee could speak to the driver, it would be to tell him to turn himself in. That could spare him from stiffer repercussions than if he were to wait until the police close in, she said.

Lee believes the man who hit her can still do the right thing. It’s not too late, she insists, for him to stop running — and to be her neighbor.