It's the Turkey You Worry About Burning on Thanksgiving, Not the Car

A woman stranded in mud on Hoyt Street with two kids may have thought her Thanksgiving Day troubles were largely over when an SUV came around 1 p.m. and they left the BMW 328 coupe by the side of the road.

Oh, no. Not by a long shot.

Darien police gave this account of the incident:

At 7:50 p.m. on Thanksgiving, police were alerted to the BMW with its engine running on the side of the road — actually, police said, it was partly on the side of the road and partly in the travel lane.

The location was Hoyt Street near its intersection with Woodway Road. The car had been traveling north and was off on the right side of the road, by the northbound lane.

The car appeared to have bottomed out in the mud and was surrounded by leaves. It was running, and the doors were locked. Nobody was around.

A neighbor reported seeing a woman and two children standing near the car and then getting picked up by another vehicle. The neighbor didn’t know if the car was running at the time.

Due to safety concerns (because the car was partly on the roadway), police decided the vehicle, which at that point had been running for as much as seven hours, should be towed.

A tow truck came and, as it was trying to lift up the vehicle with a winch — the car caught on fire. Firefighters were called in and extinguished the flames. It was later determined that dry leaves (and if they weren’t dry when the vehicle got there, they were certainly dry after the engine had been heating them up for hours) combined with the hot engine would have somehow started the fire.

A check of the license plate showed that the car belonged to a New Canaan woman. Police spoke with the woman, who explained that she had planned to make arrangements to have it moved the next day.

She had no idea that the car had been running after she left it there, she told police. She didn’t believe it was running when she had left. Had she accidentally pressed the remote control on her key fob? Had the car started running for some other reason? She didn’t know.

The woman was not charged. The burning questions remain unanswered.

The vehicle experienced extensive damage.