SAN ANTONIO -- Christina Puente loved her mom and enjoyed spending time with her.

So even though she was feeling a bit under the weather on Thursday, she still went to her mother's house. Little did she know it would be the last day she would spend with her mother, Maria Mena.

The 67-year-old Mena was struck and killed Thursday night as she crossed Zarzamora Street after picking up some groceries at the H-E-B in the 6800 block of Zarzamora. Her arms filled with grocery bags, Mena was attempting to make it to a bus stop on the other side of Zarzamora when she was run down by what witnesses described as a speeding, black pickup truck.

Christina Puente had been at the H-E-B with her mother, but left when she started feeling sick.

"I just remember telling her, 'I love you, mom. Be careful mom,'" said Puente, sitting in her mother's home Friday as she clung to a photograph of her mother and her father, who died 16 years earlier.

Puente said her mother spent much of the day telling stories about her youth and talking about how lonely she was without her husband.

"We laughed, we joked, she picked on me, it was great," said Puente.

After eating dinner with her husband and 8-year-old daughter, Puente took her mother to H-E-B to do some shopping. Puente said she started to feel sick and called her husband to pick her up. Puente's daughter asked to stay behind with her grandmother.

"She told my daughter, 'Not today, I don't feel good, I'm just going to get a few things and take a taxi home,'" said Puente.

Mena enjoyed taking the bus everywhere. Her family said it gave her a sense of freedom. But Mena's daughters worried about their mom riding the bus at night and encouraged her to take taxis instead.

"But she wouldn't listen," said Judy Muniz, another of Mena's five daughters. "I said, 'Don't be going home on the bus late and she says, 'No, that's okay, I'll just go home in the taxi, that way I'll get home safe,' but she changed her mind."

After Puente left the store, Mena decided to cut her shopping trip short. She called Puente's husband, Benny, to tell him she was going to catch a bus home and then hung up abruptly because she saw the bus coming. Minutes later, she was dead.

The driver of the truck that hit Mena didn't stop. The heavily damaged vehicle was found a block away from the accident scene, but the driver was long gone. As police search for the driver, Mena's family is making an urgent plea to anyone who may have information about the driver's identity.

"Have a heart. She's our mother. She's a grandmother," said Muniz. "Somebody out there has to know something. Please contact the San Antonio Police Department and help us find this person."