Police have released the 911 call made by South Dakota’s attorney general moments after he is believed to have struck a pedestrian fatally that he initially thought was a deer.
Jason Ravnsborg had told law enforcement responding to the Sept. 12 crash that he thought he might have hit an animal. The following day, Ravnsborg said he returned to the site of the crash and discovered the body of 55-year-old Joseph Boever.
“I’m the attorney general, and I am, I don’t know, I hit something. … It was in the middle of the road,” Ravnsborg told the 911 dispatcher before the two discussed the location of the crash. The call took place before Ravnsborg returned to the scene the following day.
When asked if he was injured, Ravnsborg said that he was not, “but my car sure as hell is.”
“Do you think it was a deer or something?” the dispatcher asked.
“I have no idea, could be, I mean, it was right in the roadway,” he responded.
Following the crash and the discovery of Boever’s body, Ravnsborg released a statement that he said was done after he saw “many rumors and stories being told and reported which do not represent a full and factual account of what happened.”
“I looked around the vehicle in the dark and saw nothing to indicate what I had hit. All I could see were pieces of my vehicle laying on and around the roadway. Because it was dark and I didn’t have a flashlight, I used my cellphone flashlight to survey the ditch but couldn’t see anything,” Ravnsborg said.
Ravnsborg, who was returning from a county dinner for Republican Party members that was held at a bar, provided a blood sample the day after the crash that showed he had a 0% blood-alcohol content at the time of the incident. South Dakota Department of Public Safety Cabinet Secretary Craig Price was asked during a Tuesday news conference why a blood sample wasn’t taken directly after the crash.
“I’m not going to speculate on the work of others,” he said, according to CNN. “I know that once our office became involved, which was the next day … we worked efficiently to go ahead and get that information.”
Price spoke about Boever’s preliminary autopsy results at the Tuesday news conference. He said the man suffered extensive internal and external injuries, although a final autopsy report may take weeks to be released.
Boever’s family has questioned the series of events that led to his death. His cousin Nick Nemec told Fox News that “the whole, ‘I hit a deer’ story is just a line of bulls—.”
Ravnsborg has not been charged with any crimes, and there is currently an investigation into the fatal crash. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said this week that he is still allowed to work in his full capacity as attorney general.
