Family hopes for answers on Mary Yocono death

• Mary Yocono, 79, was killed in a hit-and-run crash in 1985 in West Akron.
• The crash happened outside Yocono’s, the family’s popular Italian restaurant.
• The family hasn’t given up hope of finding out the identity of the driver.

On a rainy late afternoon in November 1985, Mary Yocono walked to a friend’s house across the street from her family’s West Akron, Ohio, restaurant to deliver an early Christmas present. 

But night fell fast, and in the darkness of her return trip across West Exchange Street, a car struck the 79-year-old grandmother, leaving her on the asphalt next to her umbrella.

After being alerted to the accident, her relatives rushed out of Yocono’s Italian restaurant and ran down the street, shocked to see their matriarch’s lifeless body beneath a white sheet.  

“It’s something you see in a movie,” Jamie Yocono, Mary’s granddaughter, tearfully recalled in a recent interview. “When it happens to you in real life, it feels like it’s fake. It’s so surreal. No one expects it.”