Long Beach police have released new surveillance images of the car they believe struck and killed 72-year-old grandmother Song Tate before fleeing the scene near Long Beach Boulevard and East 23rd Street, as investigators work to identify the driver more than a month after her death.
According to KTLA, the newly released images show a silver Ford Mustang with a black convertible top, black stripes and black rims. Updated details shared by local Facebook users indicate that the suspect vehicle traveled east on Willow Street, turned south onto Long Beach Boulevard before the crash, and was last seen heading south on Pasadena Avenue toward 20th Street, according to a video posted by a Long Beach resident on Facebook. The collision happened around 8:52 p.m. on September 5 near 23rd Street, per that account, though KTLA reported police were called to the scene around 9 p.m. that night.
A Grandmother’s Final Walk
Tate was out on her routine route delivering warm meals to strangers who gathered outside a smoke shop near her family’s home when she was struck, according to the Long Beach Post. Her daughter, Sonya Rose, went looking for her mother after she failed to come home that night and discovered she had died only after finding her blood-stained blue bandana lying in the roadway the next morning, the outlet reported.
Officers who responded to the area found Tate lying on the Metro A Line tracks that run along the median of Long Beach Boulevard, and she was pronounced dead at the scene, per KTLA. Authorities initially said the vehicle impact had thrown Tate into the path of an oncoming Metro train and that she was struck a second time by the train. Detectives later determined, following further investigation, that Tate was never hit by the train at all — a correction to the timeline Hoodline reported in its initial coverage of the crash. The September 5 collision marked the fifth fatal incident involving Metro A Line light-rail tracks recorded across Los Angeles County this year, according to regional transit crash records cited in that same report.
Remembering Song Tate
Born in South Korea, Tate spent years doing electrical assembly work on airplane tails at Boeing in Long Beach, per KTLA. She lived with her daughter and helped raise her 10-year-old granddaughter, and she left behind a daughter, a son and that granddaughter. An online fundraiser organized by her family has raised more than $9,300 toward funeral costs and savings that Tate and Rose had been setting aside for an overseas trip to reunite with family in Korea, the station reported…