On the early evening of Friday, Oct. 17, a hit-and-run driver struck my neighbor\u2019s car, ramming it into mine \u2013 a vehicle I\u2019d very recently purchased \u2013 causing considerable damage to both vehicles and the one she was driving. Both vehicles were legally parked on West Seventh Street. We don\u2019t usually park there, but due to our parking lot being repaved, we had to park elsewhere for four to five days.<\/p>\n
While I\u2019m very disappointed in one community member \u2013 the hit-and-run driver \u2013 it remains to be seen whether an adequate remedy will be provided by that driver or his or her mother\u2019s insurance policy. In the meantime, I\u2019d like to give credit where credit is due and offer a heartfelt thank-you to the Cortez Police Department overall for a job well done in locating the driver.<\/p>\n
In particular, Sgt. Vance Carver and officer Taylor Marston deserve significant credit for their response and detective work in first locating the suspect vehicle \u2013 and then the guilty driver. This took brains, intuition and a level of performance that only comes from excellent police officers. I just can\u2019t say enough about this \u2013 and I really want those guys to be proud of themselves and proud of what they do. I am very grateful. Thanks also go to Officer Jennings for effectively documenting this chain of events in police report No. 2500-2061.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d also like to extend a thank-you to my neighbor, Allen Phelps Jr., who greatly assisted the officers by virtue of his speedy assistance and effective communication to on-duty law enforcement. Besides my neighbor Allen, I\u2019d also really like to thank the young couple who had the clarity of mind and phone in hand to get that photo. I want this neighbor to know how grateful I am for having him in this community \u2013 and I consider him a hero.<\/p>\n
With neighbors like these and dedicated law enforcement doing a great job like this, I can\u2019t help but feel that \u2013 although this has been difficult \u2013 I am actually surrounded by a solid community of good people here in Cortez. I remain hopeful that some good may come from this in the form of a court-ordered \u201cwake-up call\u201d of some kind for the driver. We all make mistakes when we\u2019re young. The question is, do we learn from those mistakes?<\/p>\n
Patrick Wherritt, Jr.<\/p>\n
Cortez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
the early evening of Friday, Oct. 17, a hit-and-run driver struck my neighbor\u2019s car, ramming it into mine \u2013 a vehicle I\u2019d very recently purchased \u2013 causing considerable damage to both vehicles and the one she was driving. Both vehicles were legally parked on West Seventh Street. We don\u2019t usually park there, but due […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-15781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17643,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15781\/revisions\/17643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15781"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=15781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}