Fernandez claimed that he had stopped near Eloy because he saw police behind him "and wanted to find out what was going on."
Not surprisingly, the cops didn't buy it.
Jamie Peachey
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(Neither Fernandez, DeJong, nor a Valley woman named Kim Senegal, whom Fernandez later listed in court documents as his girlfriend, could be located for this story.)
On February 4, 1999, a Pinal County grand jury indicted Alonzo Fernandez on charges of manslaughter, leaving the scene of an accident, and possession of marijuana.
Lindsey DeJong wasn't charged, and police re-interviewed her the following month at a Motel 6 back on Van Buren.
Her account changed somewhat: She said Fernandez hadn't wanted to let the girl out of the car. The girl started crying when he wouldn't stop, seemed to panic, and leapt to her death.
DeJong again swore that she never knew the girl's name.
Fernandez spent almost four months in the Pinal County Jail before he was sentenced to time served after pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, a felony.
He told a probation officer that "all three of us were on the freeway smoking marijuana. She started freaking, saying her boyfriend would get mad if she left, and she jumped out of the car. I saw her in the rear-view mirror, and people were stopping to help her. I was scared and kept going. I never knew her name. I'm still haunted by this 'til this day."
In September 1999, a county judge issued a bench warrant after Fernandez failed to report to his probation officer repeatedly.
Authorities still haven't found him.
The dead girl's body ended up at the Medical Examiner's Office, where it became known as 99-305.
Among possible clues to her identity was a small tattoo of a blue heart near her chest.
Another clue was a gold-colored ring with the initials DMA engraved inside of it.
Sometime after an autopsy, authorities released the body for burial.
The advent of Dodt's Unidentified Persons Bureau two years ago brought attention to the unsolved case.
99-305 has become a cause célèbre on sites devoted to unidentified and missing persons. So far, no luck.
This is how an investigator at the Medical Examiner's Office summarized what happened on the early evening of February 18, 2007:
"A resident was barbecuing in his backyard in an open rural area near Gila Bend when his dog was found chewing on an unidentified object.
"The owner of the dog pulled the object from the dog's mouth and suspected it looked like a decomposed human hand missing multiple digits."
The man contacted sheriff's deputies, who searched without success in the desert near the man's home for the rest of the body. The deputies then took the hand to the M.E's Office.
One afternoon not long ago, Suzi Dodt stepped into one of the freezers at the morgue, lifted a bowl from a shelf and carried it into a room normally used for autopsies.
She carefully set the bowl down on a towel she had placed on a stainless-steel slab and turned on a bright light.
Then Dodt put on a pair of latex gloves and dipped her hand into a bluish liquid.
From out of the liquid came what she referrred to as "Mr. Hand, Mr. Finger, The Thing, whatever you want to call it."
It was surreal, seeing part of someone's hand, with the skin still on and two fingers and a thumb, resting on a white towel with the light shining starkly down on it.
Dodt stared at the hand, lost in thought, before speaking.
"That mummified hand belongs to somebody," she says. "He may be dead or alive, though I'm not going with alive at the moment."
Dodt gently lifted the hand and placed it back in its bowl.
"I would just love," she said, "to find out whose hand this is!"
