A young Atlin, B.C. man is in Whitehorse General Hospital this week after being struck by an unknown vehicle outside his community last Friday.

Today, his family is asking whoever struck him to come forward.

At about 5 a.m. last Friday, Michael Point was walking into Atlin from his home just outside the community. He was going to catch the 6 a.m. bus to Whitehorse to visit his aunt.

About a kilometre outside of Atlin, he bent to tie his shoelace and was struck from behind. Point was thrown off the road, and the vehicle kept going.

"I laid on the ground for a while and then I pretty much forced myself to get up and walk,” he told the Star Thursday, speaking from his hospital bed. "If I'd just laid there, I would have been hit by another car.”

Point figures it took him almost two hours to walk the last kilometre to the community. When he arrived, he was cold and in shock.

He went in to the first open door he found, a laundromat, and laid down, unable to do anything else but wait for someone to come along.

He was found by a local youth worker and taken to the health station.

"If Mitch hadn't found him, Michael would have died there,' Point's aunt, Shirley Reeves, said Thursday.

"There's no coincidence in Tlingit land,” said Sandra Jack, a close friend of the family.

Reeves and Jack feel the hit-and-run is evidence of growing problems in Atlin, a community of no more than 400 people.

"I think it's very easy for people to think, ‘We're at the end of the road, no one's going to look at what's going on here,'” Jack said of the unknown driver's attitude.

She said she is disappointed in what she feels was a lacklustre response from the local RCMP officers.

"They just told me, ‘There's nothing we can do.' They should have been stopping cars on the road on Friday, but on Monday they still hadn't done anything.”

She pointed to comments made earlier this year by miner Mike Mickey, who lost an estimated quarter million dollars' worth of gold from his placer mining operation last year.

The gold was frozen solid into Mickey's sluice box when he and his crew finished up for the day one night last November. When he returned the next day, the gold was gone.

He reported the theft, but police were unable to find the gold or the thief. Mickey criticized the RCMP in Atlin, saying they are quick to hand out tickets for running stop signs but not much help when it comes to investigations.

Jack said she sees more and more "deviant” behaviour in the normally sleepy settlement.

She said she hopes the police and others involved in the justice system will ensure the "end-of-the-road” attitude won't result in more crimes being committed in Atlin.

Reeves said she thinks racism may have reared its head last Friday, because as Point struggled toward town, none of the vehicles that passed him stopped when the injured man tried to flag them down.

She doesn't believe the police will identify the person who hit her nephew, and hopes the driver will come forward on his or her own.

"I want this person to feel guilty and turn himself in,” she said, adding there is no way Point could have been struck without the driver knowing.

But Point thinks the driver might not know what happened.

"I'm not even sure if they saw me,” he said of the collision. "Maybe that's why they didn't stop. They probably weren't expecting someone to be bent over tying their shoe on the road, so I don't blame them for not stopping.”

But he agrees with Reeves and Jack that the driver must have felt the bump when the vehicle struck Point's back.

The 22-year-old is recovering from a lacerated spleen, liver, and kidney, as well as a bruised lung and several broken ribs.

"I'm not allowed to leave my room,” Point said. "It's pretty much like being in jail.”

The young man is hoping to be able to head back home over the weekend, but said he expects to be on bed rest for a while and off of work for even longer.