Can You Wipe This Big Bug off my Windshield?

Elderly Man Drives 3 Miles With Body Smashed on Hood

ST. PETERSBURG – Ralph Parker had shown signs of
dementia before, but his condition worsened dramatically over the past
week. Argumentative one minute, calm the next. Alarmed, Parker’s son
left Idaho on Wednesday to get his 93-year-old father in a safe place,
police
said.

Before he could get here, his dad backed his gold Chevrolet Malibu out
of the driveway and went for a drive.

It ended horribly. Parker hit a man crossing 34th Street S, severing the
man’s right leg, then drove 3 miles with the body stuck in the windshield.

When police asked Parker what happened, he said the body seemed to drop
from the sky.
Parker thought it was December and that he was headed home to Pinellas
Park, not south toward the Sunshine Skyway bridge, police said.

Julia Zumpf was driving south on 34th Street about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday
when she saw the gold Malibu unsteady in the road. Drunken driver, she
thought.

Then Zumpf, 44, saw a pedestrian step off the center median and head across
the three-lane road.

The driver of the Malibu slammed on his brakes, Zumpf said. She thought
the driver missed him but suddenly she heard a crash and saw a leg flying
in front of her blue Buick LeSabre. "It went at least one story in
the air," she said.

His shoe then popped off before the limb came to a rest on a strip of grass
west of the street, in front of Howard Johnson’s.

The driver kept going, as if not realizing what happened, Zumpf said. She
drove several blocks, trying to locate the body, thinking it rolled off
the car, and called 911. "I thought it was just a hit-and-run," she
said.

The body was still on the Malibu. The head and shoulders were punched through
the windshield, the torso slung backward over the hood.

Three miles later, the car approached the Sunshine Skyway toll bridge.
As Parker decelerated, the body slumped entirely inside, the man’s face
pushed up against the dash.
The macabre scene looked like a Halloween prank to the toll taker. Then
she saw the blood.

story from the
Saint Petersburg Times