Parents of teen who was involved in two-car accident upset with driver leaving scene

By: Chris Rosa
The parents of the teen who was involved in a two-car accident on Pumping Plant Road earlier this week were stunned to learn that someone else tried to pretend to be the person driving the vehicle that hit their son’s truck..

On Tuesday at 3 p.m., 17-year-old Reiss Hebert was driving home from Vermilion Catholic High School on Pumping Plant Road. On a curve, about a half-mile north of La. 335, Hebert’s truck collided with a vehicle driven by Amanda Hinton of Vidallia, La.

Hinton’s vehicle stopped in the middle of the street, while Hebert’s trucked flipped and came to a stop upside down, 30 yards from Hinton’s vehicle in a ditch.

Hebert, who was wearing his seatbelt, crawled out of the window and escaped the accident with only a cut on his forehead. The accident occurred the day before his 18th birthday.

Hinton, on the other hand, decided to leave the accident scene and never returned. She flagged down someone seconds after the accident, jumped in the car and left. The person took her somewhere. The driver who took her somewhere returned to the accident scene and reported it to the Sheriff’s deputy, Hank Viator.

In the meantime, another female returned to the accident scene and pretended to be the driver of the vehicle that hit Hebert.

Stan Hebert, Reiss’s father, talked to her when she arrived. “She said she was driving the other vehicle,” Stan said. “But the bus driver who got to the accident right after it happened, said that was not the same girl who was driving.”

Viator re-questioned her, Stan said, and she admitted she was not the driver.

“It bothered me when I heard that,” Stan said. But Reiss’s mother, Sheila, was upset that the driver was not required to comeback to the scene. “I want to know why she left. Things looks fishy,” said Sheila.

The Sheriff’s Office located Hinton at least three hours after the accident. She received two tickets, hit and run and no driver’s license.

“How do we know that was really her who was driving the car that hit my son?” Stan said.

The Heberts, who lives near the accident, travel on Pumping Plant Road every day. Sheila said the road is dangerous because there are no lines marking the center lane and the road is narrow. She hopes that this accident gets the Police Jury to mark the road with lines.

Other residents who live on Pumping Plant Road, who were at the scene of the accident, said vehicles travel too fast on the country road.