OAKDALE, California — The call came from a coffee shop. Workers at the Dutch Bros Coffee on Yosemite Avenue in Oakdale, the small Stanislaus County city in California's Central Valley, called for help just after 7:15 a.m. on Friday, November 13, after finding an unresponsive man near the business, according to the Oakdale Police Department. Officers who arrived found that the man had died.

Source: FOX40

Police described the man as a 34-year-old Oakdale resident. His name is being kept private until relatives can be notified — the standard practice in a sudden death, and the reason this report does not name him. What investigators said next turned a grim morning discovery into a criminal hunt: based on the evidence at the scene, they believe the man had been struck by a vehicle, and that the driver left without stopping.

Source: CBS News Sacramento

The timeline police have built from video

The man was not found for roughly ten hours. Based on surveillance video officers have reviewed, police believe the collision happened shortly after 9 p.m. on Thursday, November 12 — the previous evening. That gap is now the centre of the investigation: a man lay dead beside one of the town's main streets through the night, and the only witnesses may be cameras.

From that footage, police have identified a vehicle of interest: a gold, four-door crossover SUV, captured on surveillance video heading westbound on River Avenue. Detectives are reviewing additional video, and they have made a specific public ask — anyone with information, and nearby businesses in the area of the Cost Less Shopping Center and along River Avenue, should check their security cameras for the vehicle around the time of the incident. In hit-and-run investigations, that kind of footage is often what turns a vehicle description into a licence plate, and a licence plate into a driver.

The law a fleeing driver faces in California

California law is blunt about the duty to stop. Vehicle Code section 20001 requires a driver involved in a collision that injures or kills someone to stop immediately, and where the crash results in a death, leaving the scene can be charged as a felony. The related duties in section 20003 include identifying yourself and rendering reasonable assistance to anyone who is hurt. Those provisions describe the legal framework investigators will apply once a driver is identified; they do not, by themselves, establish who was driving the gold SUV or exactly how the collision happened, and the investigation into both questions is continuing.

A main street, a farming town, and a familiar road for Valley families

Oakdale is a city of roughly 23,000 people in Stanislaus County, in the heart of the Central Valley's farm and dairy country. Yosemite Avenue is its main east-west street, carrying state highway traffic through town toward the Sierra foothills, and River Avenue runs through the neighbourhoods and shopping areas residents use every day. Stanislaus County — Modesto, Turlock, Oakdale and the farm towns between them — is also home to one of California's largest Punjabi communities, of farming families and truck drivers for whom these are not anonymous highways but the roads to school, the gurdwara and the yard. A pedestrian death on a street like this, unresolved, is the kind of case a whole town ends up carrying.

What happens next

Three things come next. The man's name will be released once his family has been notified. Detectives will keep working through surveillance and dashcam footage from the Yosemite Avenue and River Avenue corridors for the night of November 12, looking for a clearer image of the gold crossover SUV. And if a driver is identified, the case will be tested against the hit-and-run law set out above. Until then, Oakdale police are asking anyone who saw the vehicle, or who has footage from that night, to come forward — in a case built on video, one more camera can be the whole investigation.