South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem on Tuesday asked the state attorney general to step down, while lawmakers started impeachment proceedings against him and officials released videos of police interviews about the night he beat and killed a man with your car last year.
Attorney General Jason R. Ravnsborg, who initially told authorities that he had hit something he believed to be probably a deer, rejected the growing pressure to resign.
Ravnsborg was accused last week of driving carelessly, using a mobile electronic device and failing to stay on his track the night of the accident last September. The charges are misdemeanors and each carries a penalty of up to 30 days in prison and a $ 500 fine.
Ms. Noem asked people to watch the videos released by the state, which show the attorney general being confronted by investigators, including one who makes a rigid statement about the victim’s impact, saying to him: “We know that his face has come out of your windshield. “
The governor said in a brief statement that, with the charges brought and the investigation closed, “I believe the attorney general should resign.” Both Ms. Noem and Mr. Ravnsborg are Republicans.
At the State House, a bipartisan group of lawmakers filed a resolution to impeach Mr. Ravnsborg, writing that the attorney general had “a special obligation to the people and laws of the state of South Dakota”. Mr Ravnsborg, the resolution said, “must be removed from that post for his crimes or three misdemeanors in the post that caused the death” of the victim, Joe Boever.
If most House legislators go ahead with impeachment, it would take two-thirds of South Dakota’s senators to remove him from office. The attorney general’s office could not be reached for comment.
Days after the accident, Ravnsborg said in a statement that he had personally found Boever’s body. But the two videos provided the first examples of Ravnsborg, 44, a Republican who took office in January 2019, telling the story of what happened that night on camera.
Special agents from the North Dakota Criminal Investigation Department, who helped with the investigation, conducted the interviews. At first, on September 14, Ravnsborg told investigators that he was coming home alone from a Republican Party dinner on the evening of September 12 and, after driving through the city of Highmore, accelerated to about 67 miles per hour on the Highway 14 from the USA.
“And then, frankly, wham,” he said. “I crashed, the incident happened. I never saw anything until the impact. ”He said he got out of the car and called 911. Then he hung up, used the phone’s flashlight and looked around the road and the ditch. He took a picture of the front of his vehicle.
“I’m thinking it’s a deer at the moment, but I didn’t see anything,” he said to two investigators during the interview, adding that he saw no blood or hair on impact, only the wreckage of his car.
After the sheriff arrived, he arranged a tow truck to transport the Attorney General’s Ford Taurus and loaned a vehicle for Mr. Ravnsborg to drive home.
The next morning, en route to returning the vehicle, Ravnsborg and a team member stopped at the crash site, dividing on foot to look around, Ravnsborg said.
Mr. Ravnsborg went to the left. “At first I thought I saw it, it looked like a deer or a deer in the ditch,” he told investigators. “But then I went up. It was the man. And he is not good. I mean, he’s dead. “
The two men then brought the sheriff, and the dead man was identified as Mr. Boever, 55, from Highmore, SD. He was apparently walking along the highway to his broken truck.
When investigators said in the first interview that they found a broken pair of glasses in his car, Ravnsborg was unable to say whether they were his, although he said he did not wear glasses.
In the second interview, on September 30, Ravnsborg was informed that the glasses belonged to Boever. “It means that his face went through his windshield,” said one of the investigators. Ravnsborg said he had not seen blood or glasses.
“We know that his face came out of his windshield,” said an investigator. The vehicle also had an impression of at least part of the man’s body on the hood, said an investigator, adding that “at some point it rolls and slides into the ditch”.
“I never saw him,” said Ravnsborg.
Mr. Boever was also carrying a flashlight, which was still on when his body was found the next day. Mr Ravnsborg said that he had not seen that light on the side of the road and that “I did not know that I was a man until the next day”.
“I think you had an idea that it was something other than a deer,” an investigator pressed.
“I simply believed it was a deer,” replied Mr Ravnsborg.
Nick Nemec, one of Boever’s cousins, said the family did not know why Boever had walked that night back to his truck, which had stopped at the side of the road after hitting a bale of hay. He said the family was distressed by what they heard in the videos.
“It is even worse than we thought,” Nemec said in an interview on Wednesday.
He said Boever worked at a grocery store in Highmore, where he stocked shelves, retrieved goods for customers and recorded purchases. He moved to the city about five years ago, renovating a small house, gardening and giving gifts of jade plants to the people he liked.
He married about 50 years old, Nemec said, and had six brothers.
“He was not a rich and powerful person like Ravnsborg, but he was a real person with a real life, with people who really cared about him,” said Nemec.
The toxicology results showed no signs that Ravnsborg was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, prosecutors said. The victim’s family questioned why Mr. Ravnsborg was not tested on the night of the collision.
After the accident, Mr Ravnsborg issued a statement saying he was “shocked and filled with sadness” and “cooperating fully with the investigation”. He also offered his “deepest condolences and condolences to the victim’s family”.
During one of the interviews, Mr. Ravnsborg defended his conduct, saying that he had thought about what he could have done differently. “I am in an extremely difficult situation,” he said. “But I believe that I did nothing wrong and obviously went over it in my mind about a thousand times.”
“I never saw that – now he, I learned – or anything that I got right, and I tried to react appropriately from there,” he said.