South Dakota’s Gov. Kristi Noem called on the state attorney general to resign on Tuesday when lawmakers started impeachment lawsuits against him and officials released videos of police interviews about the night he hit a man with his car last year and killed.
Attorney General Jason R. Ravnsborg, who initially told authorities he had hit what he thought was most likely a deer, has rejected mounting pressure to resign.
Mr Ravnsborg was charged last week with careless driving, using a mobile electronic device and not staying in his orbit on the night of last September’s crash. The charges are felonies and each carries a fine of up to 30 days in prison and a fine of $ 500.
Ms. Noem urged people to watch the videos released by the state showing the attorney general being confronted by detectives, including someone making a grim claim about the victim’s impact by telling him : ‘We know his face came through your windshield. “
The governor said in a brief statement that with the charges filed and the investigation over, “I think the Attorney General should resign.” Both Mrs. Noem and Mr. Ravnsborg are Republicans.
At the Statehouse, 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, “should be removed from office for his crimes or three offenses in office that resulted in the death” of the victim, Joe Boever.
Should a majority of House lawmakers promote the impeachment, it would take two-thirds of South Dakota state senators to remove him from office. The Attorney General’s office was not immediately available for comment.
Days after the crash, Mr. Ravnsborg said in a statement that he personally found Mr. Boever’s body. But the two videos were the first examples of Mr. Ravnsborg, 44, a Republican who took office in January 2019 and told the story of what happened in front of the camera that night.
Special agents from the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, who assisted in the investigation, conducted the interviews. In the first, on Sept. 14, Mr. Ravnsborg told investigators he was driving home alone from a Republican party dinner on the night of Sept. 12, and after passing through the town of Highmore, he accelerated to about 108 miles per hour. on US Highway 14.
“And then frankly, wham,” he said. ‘I got hit, the incident happened. I’ve never seen anything until impact. He said he jumped out of the car and called the emergency number. He hung up, used the flashlight on his phone and looked around the highway and the ditch. He took a picture of the front of his car.
“I think it’s a deer right now, but I haven’t seen anything,” he told two detectives during the interview, adding that he didn’t see any blood or fur from the impact, just debris from his car.
After the sheriff arrived, he arranged for a tow truck to tow the attorney general’s Ford Taurus and lent a vehicle to Mr. Ravnsborg to drive home.
The next morning, on the way to return the vehicle, Mr. Ravnsborg and a staff member at the scene of the accident and split up on foot to look around, said Mr. Ravnsborg.
Mr. Ravnsborg went to the left. “I initially thought I saw it, it looked like a fawn or a deer in a ditch,” he told investigators. ‘But then I come upstairs. It was the man. And he is no good. I mean, he’s dead. “
The two men then brought in the sheriff, and the dead man was identified as Mr. Boever, 55, from Highmore, SD. He had apparently walked down the highway to his handicapped truck.
When investigators said in the first interview that they found broken glasses in his car, Mr. Ravnsborg couldn’t say if they were his, even though he said he wasn’t wearing glasses.
In the second interview, on September 30, Mr. Ravnsborg was told that the glasses belonged to Mr. Boever. “That means his face came through your windshield,” one of the detectives said. Mr. Ravnsborg said he had not seen the blood or the glasses.
“We know his face came through your windshield,” said one investigator. The vehicle also had an imprint of at least part of the man’s body on the hood, one researcher said, adding that “at some point it rolls off and slides into the ditch.”
“I’ve never seen him,” said Mr. Ravnsborg.
Mr. Boever also had a flashlight with him, which was still burning when his body was found the next day. Mr. Ravnsborg said he had not seen that light on the side of the road and that he “didn’t know until the next day that it was a man.”
“I think you had an idea it was different from a deer,” urged one detective.
“I just thought it was a deer,” replied Mr. Ravnsborg.
Nick Nemec, one of Mr. Boever’s cousins, said the family was unsure why Mr. Boever had walked back that night to his truck, which had stopped by the side of the road after hitting a hay bale. He said the family was upset by what they heard in the videos.
“It’s even worse than we thought,” Mr. Nemec said in an interview on Wednesday.
He said Mr. Boever had worked in a grocery store in Highmore, where he stocked shelves, picked up goods for customers, and called for purchases. He moved to the city about five years ago, renovated a small house, did gardening, and gave jade plants as gifts to the people he cared about.
He was married in his early fifties, Mr. Nemec said, and had six brothers and sisters.
“He was not a rich, powerful person like Ravnsborg was, but he was a real person with a real life with people who really cared about him,” said Mr Nemec.
The toxicology results showed no signs that Mr. Ravnsborg was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, prosecutors said. The victim’s family has wondered why Mr. Ravnsborg was not tested the night of the collision.
Following the accident, Mr Ravnsborg issued a statement saying he was “shocked and sad” and “cooperated fully with the investigation”. He also offered his “deepest condolences and condolences to the family” of the victim.
During one of the interviews, Mr. Ravnsborg defended his behavior by saying that he had thought about what he could have done differently. “I’m in an extremely difficult place,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong and I’ve obviously repeated it a thousand times in my head.”
“I’ve never seen it – now he, I’ve learned – or anything that touched me, and I tried to respond appropriately from there,” he said.