Dobbs: Kudos for some sensational sleuthing

It seems the police get criticized as much as they get credit. This column is about credit. Kudos to the Colorado State Patrol and the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office for some sensational sleuthing. 

After a fatal nighttime hit and run back on Jan. 7 of a bicyclist on Highway 6 between Edwards and Avon, law enforcement didn’t have a lot to go on. In fact, no one knew that anything had happened until a report came in that the victim, Mario Romero, who worked at the Main Street Grill in Edwards, never got home. 

So deputies from the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office went searching along the route between his work and his home. They found his body down an embankment 20 feet from the highway. That’s when they brought in the Colorado State Patrol.

As described in The Vail Daily on March 22, the trooper assigned to the investigation found “numerous bits of white debris from a vehicle,” then “a fog light assembly with a part number,” which research revealed had come from a 2010, 2011, or 2012 Subaru Legacy Outback.

So they visited businesses with surveillance cameras. One, a Stop N Save, showed “an individual on a bike ride past the store on westbound Highway 6 at 01:18:43 hours.” They kept watching and a minute later, according to the affidavit of the trooper, “what appears to be a white Subaru with something on the roof is shown traveling past the store westbound on Highway 6.”

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They continued their search for surveillance video and found another camera, at the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District plant, that showed a white Subaru “with a rooftop storage box on it and a passenger headlight out, pass the plant, and pull into the apartment complex.”  

Eventually, tips came in and by mid-January, they had a suspect, a woman with a white Subaru Outback who lived in an apartment in Edwards. On the day Romero died, she had texted a colleague from work that she “really messed up” and might have to leave Eagle County.

The police figured out that on her way home from work, she would have driven the route where the body was found. With a search warrant, they found the Subaru. It wasn’t hard to put two-plus-two together: “I observed that there was damage to the passenger-side windshield consistent with striking a pedestrian,” the trooper said. “I also observed vehicle debris inside the vehicle that appeared to be the fog light housing.”

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But the woman was gone. 

So they moved on to the next step: they pinged her phone. What that revealed was she was in Arkansas. They arrested her there on March 21.

As I read The Vail Daily’s account, I kept telling myself that if it were a Hollywood movie, I’d have been impressed by law enforcement’s legwork. But this was no movie, it was a real-life tragedy, and the police are doing this kind of thing every day of the week. We just don’t see it.

Greg Dobbs is a speaker, author, and veteran television journalist who is a part-time resident of East Vail. Check out more of his writing at GregDobbs.Substack.com.