(C) South Dakota Searchlight This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Q&A: The long road to ‘Short Walk,’ a new podcast on the Ravnsborg accident and impeachment [1] ['Seth Tupper', 'More From Author', '- February'] Date: 2024-02-21 Jason Ravnsborg’s commitment to crisscrossing the state in his car led to his success and his downfall, according to the producer of a new podcast about the former South Dakota attorney general. Before Ravnsborg’s involvement in a crash that killed a pedestrian, he defined himself in part by the long drives he made to political and official functions. “One thing I’m good at is driving,” Ravnsborg said at a public meeting just months before the crash. Details like that are woven throughout Lee Strubinger’s deeply researched and reported podcast, “Short Walk,” about Ravnsborg’s rise and fall. All nine episodes were released Tuesday on multiple podcast platforms. In 2020, Ravnsborg was driving home to Pierre from a Republican fundraising dinner in Redfield when he struck and killed Joe Boever, who was walking alongside a rural stretch of highway near Highmore. Ravnsborg told investigators he didn’t know what he’d hit and denied being distracted by his smartphone. He drove home that night in a borrowed vehicle and said he didn’t find Boever’s body until the next morning, upon his return to the accident scene. Investigators said Ravnsborg had been using his smartphone during the drive. They also cast doubt on Ravnsborg’s story about not finding the body on the night of the accident, with details including the presence of Boever’s glasses ending up in Ravnsborg’s car after Boever’s face impacted the windshield. Ravnsborg eventually pleaded no contest to making an illegal lane change and using his phone while driving — both misdemeanors — and was impeached and removed from office in 2022. Strubinger, a reporter for South Dakota Public Broadcasting, covered the story from beginning to end and was still covering it last week, when Ravnsborg appeared before the state Supreme Court to argue against the suspension of his law license. Following are portions of a South Dakota Searchlight interview with Strubinger about the podcast. Searchlight’s questions and Strubinger’s answers have been edited for length and clarity. Listen to “Short Walk” The “Short Walk” podcast is available from South Dakota Public Broadcasting and podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. What’s the value of taking a deep dive back into this story and retelling it in an episodic format? I think the value is, because it was such a busy time that we were all in at that moment, to just sort of take a step back and explain, “here’s what happened with this,” because at the time it was COVID, it was Trump’s impeachment, it was Governor Kristi Noem’s rising national profile, all those things. So to just kind of pluck this particular story out and put it all in one location for people to sit down and listen, and to try and tell what happened — I still think there’s some misconceptions about the entire thing, and so this was a chance to step back and tell a fuller story. What are the misconceptions? People still tell me to this day that they think he was drunk the night of the accident. Having covered state politics, if he had even had one beer, I think we would know it, because people talk. It was a small enough event that the people who were at this particular thing, somebody would have said, “Yeah, he had some alcohol while he was there.” And I think there was this perception that, “Well, of course they threw him out, because he killed that guy.” But we barely got to the Senate trial and even then, everything was in Ravnsborg’s favor until it got to the Senate, and on the first impeachment article, they barely approved that one [with no votes to spare on a vote that required a two-thirds majority]. Ravnsborg rejected attempts by other Republicans to get him to resign. The eventual public release of investigative materials seemed designed, in part, to put further pressure on him. If he had resigned early on, would some of those details have stayed confidential? Maybe not, because early on the governor did make a commitment to release the investigation file. So maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn’t have, but his defiance certainly didn’t help him in that regard. And one of the things that kind of sticks out to me just in terms of this whole story is that the very thing that helped him get to this particular point in his political career was ultimately what ended up bringing him down in the long run. He was coming home from a Lincoln Day dinner. He built his name ID by going to Lincoln Day dinners across the state, doing ballot question explanations, running for US Senate — all those things, getting in front of these party officials who would ultimately end up nominating him for this position. And that thing that he was doing ultimately led to his downfall. Has Ravnsborg ever fully expressed remorse for the accident? There is a question out there of whether he has apologized to the family. One of the things that we don’t know is the terms of the civil suit that was settled between him and [Joe Boever’s widow] Jenny Boever, so that could have come with an apology. I don’t really know. There is a level of remorse there, because he said he was sorry the accident occurred. It’s an interesting apology, but you know one of the things that he said at the recent hearing on the fate of his law license was that it’s been 1,200 and some-odd days since the accident, and he marks every day on his calendar and says a prayer for Joe Boever and himself. And that really stuck with me, the fact that Jason Ravnsborg starts his day every day thinking about this particular incident that happened in the blink of an eye. And so I think that’s definitely a window into something — whether you call it remorse or not — that he’s going to deal with for the rest of his life. You devoted an episode to Joe Boever, the man who was killed in the accident. Why was it important for you to do that? I guess I was so dissatisfied with typing his name over and over in news stories and not really knowing anything about it, and so one of the things that I went out to try and do is to understand, on some level, who he was as a person, and just to kind of get an idea of how he lived his life. For example, people talked about him struggling with depression, and I wondered, what did that look like? It turns out it looked a lot different than how I originally thought. This guy read a lot of philosophy and was very well read, and he thought about the role of society, and he was kind of an outsider, a bit of an outcast. So I just thought it was worthwhile to tell a little bit more about who this person was. The night of the accident, Boever had driven his pickup into a ditch and had gotten a ride back into town. Then he walked back out to the pickup and was ultimately struck and killed by Ravnsborg’s car. Apparently we’ll never know why Boever walked back out to his pickup that night? I thought I had pieced it together. But when I ran it by the family, they didn’t seem to think that was particularly the case. And so we won’t ever really know. The only indicators that inform how I think about it is in his truck was his depression medication and his rolling tobacco. And so my thought was maybe he was walking out to his truck to go get that stuff. But he was walking back toward town, and those two items were still in his vehicle. So that doesn’t quite add up. As part of producing the podcast, you went out to the accident scene at about the same time of night as the accident happened. What was that like? I tried to do — in radio we do these things called a stand-up. And I tried to express a certain, you know, “can you believe everything that led to this moment” type of thing, and I got to a certain point that I just didn’t have any words left. It was very haunting and surreal to be there in that moment, to just sort of stand there and listen to the crickets, and the weather was perfect, the sky was clear. And it was just really kind of haunting. This story has so many layers politically, legally, ethically and morally. What are the lasting lessons we can take from it? I think one of the lasting lessons here is that in a state with such one-party rule, you’re going to have to face these kinds of uncomfortable things when it comes to members of your own party. And I guess I’m thinking a lot about Will Mortenson and how he’s House majority leader now, but at the time, he was in his first term in office and brought impeachment articles against the attorney general while House Democrats in Congress were considering impeachment articles against former President Donald Trump [drawing intense anti-impeachment criticism from Republicans]. The timing couldn’t have been worse politically. But he stuck with it, and a lot of people lauded him for his efforts in doing this whole thing. So I guess a lesson is, politically, don’t be afraid to do the right thing. [END] --- [1] Url: https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2024/02/21/qa-the-long-road-to-short-walk-a-new-podcast-on-the-ravnsborg-accident-and-impeachment/ Published and (C) by South Dakota Searchlight Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/sdsearchlight/