On Saturday, September 12, 2020, Joseph Boever, 55 was walking on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 14 just outside Highmore SD. He was struck and killed by a car being driven by South Dakota’s Attorney General, Jason Ravnsborg, 44. What happened? It’s hard to say. The victim cannot give his version. And Ravnsborg keeps polishing his.
Boever was walking back to check on a truck that had run off the road earlier. Ravnsborg was driving home to Pierre from a political event in Redfield. He claims he wasn’t drinking. And in fairness, no one is saying he was. However, he is known for his lead-foot driving with six speeding tickets in the state in the last six years. South Dakota has some of the highest speed limits in the country so that’s quite an achievement. He has also scored two speeding tickets in neighboring Iowa.
After the accident, Ravnsborg said he called 911. And reported he had hit a deer. The SD Dept of Public Safety won’t confirm he did, saying it was part of an ongoing investigation. He used his cell phone’s flashlight to look around but saw no deer corpse — or anything else, besides debris. Hyde County Sheriff, Mike Volek, arrived at the scene and also found nothing. Volek then lent Ravnsborg his personal vehicle so he could continue to Pierre. Is that the usual protocol after accidents in South Dakota? Or is this the boys' club in action?
The next day, Ravnsborg returned with Volek’s car to Highmore. Driving in tandem was his chief of staff, Tim Bormann. On the way, he stopped by the scene to take another look. This time, at 10:30 AM Sunday, he found Joseph Boever’s body in a ditch. But instead of calling 911, he drove to Sheriff Volek’s house. They returned to the scene where the sheriff told Ravnsborg he could leave. Is that how homicides are investigated in SD?
The body was left lying by the side of the road for hours. And inexplicably Boever’s widow wasn’t informed of her estranged husband’s death until that evening.
People have questioned Ravnsborg’s claim that he thought he hit a deer. Especially after Boever’s glasses were found in his car, indicating Boever’s head had gone through the windshield. However, records show he was on his cell phone catching up on his Yahoo! email account at 10:20 p.m. Then moments later he was viewing an article on the Dakota Free Press website.
A minute later Ravnsborg went to the Real Clear Politics website, and a minute after that -- moments before he struck and killed 55-year-old Joe Boever — he was viewing an article about Biden on disgraced reporter John Solomon's ‘Just The News’ website. A conspiracy theory of Biden and his indebtedness to China caused by some action of his son Hunter. The usual conservative echo-chamber nonsense
Ravnsborg might have been so distracted he had no idea of what he had hit, but it is an odd defense — “I’m innocent because I was breaking the law”. Unfortunately, South Dakota has no negligent homicide law. So Ravnsborg dodged a bullet there.
Being a conservative politician, Ravnsborg has been tending to his political future. A few days after the accident he released a letter of indignant, ‘set the record straight’, woe-is-me huffiness, explaining why it was perfectly reasonable that he had hit Boever. Why all his actions were legal. Why he was blameless. Finally, in the last paragraph, he extended a perfunctory “deepest condolences” to the Boever family before finishing up with a restatement of his complete innocence.
He has also hired an old friend, Mike Deaver, a principal of Strategies 360º as a media relations guru. Deaver brings expertise in sports marketing to the table. But that’s conservatives for you. Always hiring friends no matter how unqualified.
But that wasn’t enough. Now faced with three misdemeanor counts — careless driving, operating a motor vehicle while on a mobile device, and driving outside his lane — he is blaming the victim. Boever was known to have mental issues. And buttressed by support from a cousin who lives 1,000 miles away in suburban Detroit, Ravnsborg now claims that Boever was looking to commit suicide by car.
Other cousins, who live in the area and were far more familiar with Boever, threw cold water on that expedient piece of nonsense. Denying that, while he did suffer depression, he was not suicidal. Not only do statistics back them up, but common sense also supports their position. It would take a remarkable piece of good luck for a man looking to commit suicide, in a remote area, to come across a car in which the driver was both distracted and driving on the shoulder. Or, as his cousin Nick Nemec said, "Joe was on the shoulder of the road. So, that I would think would indicate he wasn't out trying to jump in front of the car."
Lack of empathy is a symptom of conservatism. And evident in Ravnsborg’s letter is his inability to see the world through the eyes of his victim’s family. But to blame the victim, in an effort to resurrect a political career, takes his lack of humanity to a rare place. His behavior has proved so reprehensible that even the Trump-loving Governor, Kristi Noem, who thought nothing of sending SD’s National to the Mexican border to burnish her conservative credit, has called for him to resign. But taking a page from the Trump playbook Ravnsborg is denying any wrongdoing and is blaming the victim.