South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg told police that he thought he hit a deer while driving Saturday night; turns out Ravnsborg hit and killed Joe Boever as he walked along the highway returning to his broken-down truck.
According to the Argus Leader, Boever, 55, was supposed to wait for his cousin, Victor Nemec, to pick him up so they could both go and fix Boever’s truck. On Friday, Boever claimed that while reaching for his tobacco, he’d hit a hay bale and damaged his ride. When Nemec arrived at Boever’s home on Sunday morning, he knew something was wrong. Boever wasn’t home but his house was unlocked and all the lights were on. Nemec immediately called the police.
The Argus Leader notes that no more than 12 hours after Nemec made the phone call, he and his brother Nick “were in a Highmore funeral home identifying Boever’s body.”
The newspaper notes that a Sunday evening press release from Gov. Kristi Noem (a Trump superfan, which is so unimportant to this story but, fuck her) acknowledged that Ravnsborg had been involved in a fatal accident but didn’t say much else.
Ravnsborg called the police shortly after the incident but only to report that he believed that he’d struck a deer. Ravnsborg was also uninjured.
I don’t know because I don’t live in a rural area (because I’ve seen horror movies and black people don’t last long in rural areas), but do you normally report to the police when you believe you’ve hit a deer? I truly don’t know. Do deer look like humans in rural areas? A bird once committed suicide on my front windshield. I don’t know what was going on in that bird’s life but I assume it was tragic. All I know is one day I was driving down the street and a bird fell from a tree and died on my damn windshield. It took all of the summoning of our lord and savior Gladys Knight (the hands-down winner of last night’s Verzuz) not to run into a goddamn sidewalk, because, A. Fucking. Bird. Just. Fell. Out. Of. The. Sky. And. Died. On. My. Window!
I just about died. But, the point is I didn’t call the police—and what would I have said?
Me imagining my call with the police: Hello, coppers? It’s me, Dracco Watts (the name I use with the federales.) A bird—that I’m pretty sure was listening to Sade at the time—just decided to end it all on my windshield. Anyway, I’m fine. Dracco out.
The Argus Leader notes that the investigation is ongoing but Victor Nemec seems to know exactly what happened.
“The attorney general hit my cousin as he was walking down the side of the road and killed him,” he said.
I cannot pass judgment on an open investigation but if I were—and this is not judgment of any kind, just speculation—I’d have to agree with Victor.
“The attorney general’s office said investigators from North Dakota are also in South Dakota and assisting in the crash investigation due to the conflict created by Ravnsborg’s role overseeing the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation,” The Argus Leader reports.
*As my uncle Rayfus would say, “Something is unclean in these greens.”
*I do not have an uncle Rayfus, but if I did, I imagine he’d say something like this and he would also have at least one tooth made from pure gold bullion.
DISCUSSION
Yeah so, if you want insurance to cover the incredible amount of damage hitting a deer does to your car, you have to call the police and file a report.
And sometimes, the deer is just injured and can run away to collapse where you won’t be able to see it in the deep, dark night.
But if he stopped and got out and surveyed his vehicle, maybe looking around with his phone flashlight a bit to see what he hit, it’s unlikely that a dead man would have run off to die alone. So yeah, something stinks.