The suspect, 35-year-old Margaret Mayer, was arrested Wednesday morning. She is expected to face a judge Thursday on a charge of failure to stop and render aid.
"First time her name came up was a few days after the crash through an anonymous tip."
It was through that tip, and others that followed, that led police to Mayer. Authorities tell us she was behind the wheel the night of December 1, when 24-year-old Chelsea Norman was struck while riding her bike home from work.
"She had been out at a bar with friends and left the bar," Harris County prosecutor Janna Oswald said. "She was driving back home on Waugh and a crash occurred."
But Mayer didn't stop. Court records show she later confessed to a friend she had been drinking and got lost on her way home and thought she had hit something. That something was Norman, who died days later from her injuries.
"If she had stuck around and called 911 herself, knowing she was the one who crashed, that may have saved Chelsea's life," Oswald said.
Police work led authorities to an auto shop where, one day after the crash, Mayer showed up with her boyfriend.
"The damage wasn't very much damage on the body; it was the windshield, the passenger side was totally smashed," shop owner Nima Mir said.
Mir says the suspect first asked for an estimate on a brake job but then later came back to get the windshield of her small Chevy truck repaired. It's same truck that now sits outside the suspect's home. The most visible sign of the accident fixed, but still small reminders of what happened that night.
Police say Mayer was arrested on suspicion of DWI once in 2008.
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