In November 1996, Evelyn Miller mortgaged her farm to bury a son, run over by a driver who fled the scene.

Patty Ryan wrote the story for The Tampa Tribune.

In the year that followed, Ryan was struck by the relentlessness of such deaths.

A search for an explanation led to Tallahassee, where Cathy English manages crash statistics for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

English's clerks haven't finished wading through boxes of 1998 reports.

She can't say yet whether hit-and-run deaths continued to climb, as they did in 1997.

But her 1997 statistics speak loudly.

Paired with the faces behind them, they show a year of tragedy and travesty on Tampa Bay area highways.

In preparing these stories, the writer interviewed more than 100 people: crash survivors, family members, detectives, prosecutors and defense attorneys.

Tribune researchers helped.

Using a computer, researcher Buddy Jaudon located Mary and Bobby Williamson, living in Meridian, Texas. The Florida Highway Patrol had been unable to find them. Until the Tribune called in March, the couple didn't know that an August 1997 crash killed their daughter.

``Had it not been for you,'' the mother wrote, ``I guess we would never have known.''

Once you know what happens on Bay area roads, you may wish that you didn't.