Osny Rameau told police he felt the impact as something collided with his SUV late on a Friday night. It wasn’t a tree or another car, he said; it knocked the driver-side mirror off his 2017 Honda Pilot and left behind hair, torn from the roots, on the broken windshield.
Rameau kept driving.
The 45-year-old Boynton Beach man appeared in front of a judge at the Palm Beach County Jail on Saturday morning — 20 days after Delray Beach police officers say Rameau struck and killed 35-year-old Deison Desroches on the way to work. A friend of Desroches watched from the gallery as Judge Scott Kerner ordered Rameau be held in jail without bail for allegedly leaving the scene of a fatal crash.
Officers said a southbound car struck Desroches as he crossed North Congress Avenue, just north of West Atlantic Avenue, shortly after midnight on June 17. Described by friends and family as a loving father, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police made an arrest Friday after information from a nearby license plate reader and an anonymous tipster pointed to the same man: Rameau, who investigators said asked a coworker “If you hit someone, do you go to jail?” one day after the crash.
Rameau told officers he didn’t know what he’d hit, and that he was too scared to stop driving. He said he continued on to Boca Raton, where he works as a security guard, before returning after his eight-hour shift to where he believe the crash happened. Police had cleared the road by then, collecting hardware broken off from Rameau’s car that would help lead to his arrest.
Rameau has been charged with various traffic infractions since 2018, paying hundreds of dollars in fines and completing a court-ordered course in 2019 titled “Basic Driver Improvement.”