Car emerges from melting snow in Ottawa parking lot

Spring is just around the corner, and with the annual thaw comes the uncovering of all kinds of things lost and forgotten under a thick blanket of snow.

Typically, the warmth reveals smaller objects as the snow melts away, but on Monday, passersby on a St. Laurent Boulevard bridge saw something unusual peeking out of a pile of snow — a car.

The silver Honda emerged from the melting snow, and an image of the vehicle caught the attention of users of the website Reddit and quickly made its rounds on the web, garnering more than 12,000 views in less than 24 hours.  

While this mystery car has amassed a lot of suspicion around how it ended up where it did — like a potential connection to some kind of crime — the answer is not as nefarious as the questions it raised.

The car belongs to an 18-year-old male employee of the Njaim Mid-East Food Centre, said the owner of the grocery store, Margo Njaim.

She said the owner of the car was involved in a single-vehicle accident earlier in the winter and had the car towed to the parking lot of the grocery store.

Njaim refused to name the owner of the vehicle, but said he is like a son to her. His biological parents currently live in Lebanon. Njaim confirmed he was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol or distracted while driving, only saying that it was a careless accident caused by the driver's inability to properly control the car's standard transmission.

The landlord of the complex where the car was left gave Njaim a month to move it, but by the time she was able to get around to it, the snow had already piled too high.

Despite it appearing as though the vehicle took a nosedive off the nearby bridge, Njaim said it just got swept up by snowplows after a storm.