This story reminds me of a similar experience that I had back in college. I was driving a shitty '92 Grand Am at the time, but I was poor and it was all I had. Anyway, I was parked in the business building's parking lot in one of the "long" spaces that were along the sides of the parking lot. I went out to my car after work and it had a fairly large dent in the front quarter panel of the driver's side, and of course, there was no note or anything. Thankfully, it happened above the wheel so my car was still perfectly drivable.
Fast-forward a few days later and I have a note from a lady who said she was sitting in her car eating lunch and saw the whole thing happen. Some rich bottle blonde mom and daughter combo were backing up their Mercedes SUV and didn't realize that there were a line of cars on the edge of the parking lot. After hitting me, they both got out, assessed the damage, and then drove away without leaving a note. Thankfully, this kind lady sitting in her car wrote down the lady's license plate number, and went to the trouble of contacting the school police department to figure out who I was via my license plate, and then sent me an email with the Mercedes license plate number and a description of what happened.
I filed an incident report with the police department, who sent an officer to their house to speak to the lady. She denied involvement, but it was hard to deny a dent in her bumper with my car's paint on it. After going back and forth a few times, her husband let me know that she has a lot of these incidents and they wanted to deal in cash to keep it off her record, so I got the most expensive estimate I could find and he cut me a check for $900 or so, which wasn't much less than my whole damn shitty car was worth. Naturally, I kept the dent and kept the money, which happened to fund an Xbox purchase for my broke ass.
I sent that lady a thank you note and some flowers, but she deserved much more. It still amazes me to this day how fortunate I was.
