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For the week of August 9 through 15, 2000

Suspect in Cody Boyd bicycle fatality says he’s sleepless amid police investigation


The "what-ifs have kept me up all night replaying it in my mind over, and over, and over…."

James McClure


By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer

Jerry McClure’s emotions are running practically out of control.

He said that he "can’t fathom the kind of loss" the mother of a dead child must feel.

Then, reflecting on his own life, he fears that his possible implication in the traffic accident that killed 9-year-old Hailey bicyclist Cody Boyd four weeks ago could mean the end of his career as a truck driver.

He said he doesn’t "feel any guilt" about the July 12 accident at the corner of Second Avenue and Bullion Street because he doesn’t recall ever seeing Boyd or feeling a jolt when Boyd was crushed by a 100-foot tractor-trailer that McClure may have been driving.

McClure is a talkative and, these days, an understandably jittery 40-year-old who said that driving semi-tractor-trailers is the "one thing in life I’ve wanted to do."

During a 70-minute interview conducted at a picnic table outside his modest, tree-shaded home on the north side of Shoshone Sunday afternoon, McClure acknowledged that he drove a 42,000 pound rig pulling two flatbed trailers at the time and place Boyd was killed.

Working for the Twin Falls-based B-Bar Ranch trucking company, he was heading toward Croy Canyon to pick up 53 tons of hay from the 600-acre Croy Creek Ranch.

Hailey police say the truck matches eyewitness descriptions, and the right rear tire of the rig matches tire imprints left at the scene.

But McClure is tormented by the fact that nobody will know for sure if he is the responsible driver until a law enforcement lab completes DNA work, possibly in the next week.

While he talked to a reporter, McClure—a 6-foot, 3-inch tall bachelor, whom coworkers nicknamed "Hasselhoff" because he resembled the star of the Bay Watch television series—chain-smoked cigarettes, flicking ashes into a green glass ashtray, his hands sometimes trembling visibly.

For McClure, who said he has only been driving trucks for 2 1/2 years and lacks the necessary seniority to get most of the high-paying jobs, the business is not highly lucrative.

He supports a mortgage on a small green and white aging mobile home and drives a silver Honda sedan for personal transportation.

He declined to be photographed during the interview.

As for speaking with the press, he said he doesn’t know if there’s any "wisdom" to it, but declared he’s not the kind of person to "run and hide."

#

The "what-ifs" of the accident, McClure said, "have kept me up all night replaying it in my mind over, and over, and over…."

The first time he heard of Boyd’s death, he said, was just hours after it happened when he pulled into the Southfield Dairy in Wendell, about a half-hour drive west of Shoshone. Another driver asked him if he had heard that a boy had been killed in the area they were driving, and McClure said no.

"I don’t listen to the radio," he said. "So, [the other driver] was looking at his truck and trailer, looking for anything. I looked at mine. We didn’t see any signs of trauma or anything.

"He was more worried than I was, and I told him, ‘look, the cops are two blocks down from where this happened. So are the EMTs (emergency medical technicians). Do you really think we would have gotten out of the canyon without being pulled over? It’s unfathomable to me that [the accident] could have been seen and the trucker not stopped. Okay?"

After three more runs that day, he said, a driver told him police were searching for a white truck with trailers.

"I was dark blue with red trailers," he said. "Obviously, they were looking for someone else. It wasn’t us."

"If you’re the guy," he said, "you’re going to go and tell them. It’s that simple. At least for me it was."

Many have questioned whether the driver could have felt the impact when Boyd and the rig collided, and whether it is reasonable to expect the driver to look in the rearview mirror and see the aftermath of the accident.

McClure said, "As far as the rearview mirrors, you make the same perfunctory glances that you do in your car, unless you’re making a turn."

And if Boyd indeed collided with the last set of wheels on the last trailer, as police believe he did, then McClure said no driver would be able to feel that.

"You’ll feel the drivers, which are the set of duals attached to the tractor," he said. "Those you can feel on the road, you can feel going over objects. Anything going on 70 to 100 feet in back of you, you won’t feel it."

McClure said his route on the morning of Boyd’s death took him from driving north on Highway 75, right onto Fourth Avenue in Hailey, left onto Croy, right onto Third Avenue, and then left onto Bullion Street for the drive into Croy Canyon.

"I don’t remember if the light [at Main Street] was in my favor," he said.

Another reason McClure said he didn’t talk to police sooner, is that law enforcement never pulled him over.

"So, my point is, if I let this whole thing go—okay?—it’s a sad thing all around, but there was nothing I could do. I didn’t go forward [for two weeks] because I didn’t see anything or hear anything. There was nothing I could have told them."

#

Then, 2 1/2 weeks ago, he once again began to worry. Police, he discovered, were scrutinizing B-Bar Ranch trucks. And, oddly, he had not been called into work for a few days when business should have been busy.

"So I called my supervisor," he said. "I called to find out if I was working on Monday. He said, ‘call me in the morning, and we’ll see if we’ve got anything going.’ I said, ‘Okay did they find anything?’ He said, ‘Well, they took a tire print and one of your mud flaps.’

"I said, ‘Fine, does [Hailey police Capt. Brian McNary, the case’s chief investigator] want us to call him? What’s going on?’ He said, ‘No, he said he’ll call you if he needed to.’ At this point, I’m thinking what’s going on here?

"So then I read the article from the first week in the Mountain Express….At that point, I thought, ‘Okay, he’s checking our trucks out, and I’m not working. ’ "

#

McClure began searching for a new job. During an interview at Walker Sand and Gravel in Bellevue, his potential new employer asked him if he’d heard about the accident. He said he had.

"And that’s when the guy said, ‘Yeah, and now they’re looking for a blue truck,’" McClure said.

"I said, ‘Okay, I was driving a blue truck.’ We concluded the interview.

"I grabbed a copy of the newspaper. And this whole entire time, I had heard that they were not looking at any criminal negligence on the part of the driver. Then I read the paper, and it says, ‘Police Dragnet’ closes in. Truck that killed Cody Boyd, so on and so forth. "And then the officers are saying they think it may be homicide or misdemeanor leaving the site of an accident. So I got hot. They’re looking at my truck but they’re not calling me? And this is what I’m reading they’re saying? So I called the department."

That was on a Wednesday, 13 days ago, McClure said. On Friday, he said, Hailey police Capt. McNary interviewed him alone at the Hailey police station. McClure filled out a statement, he said, and McNary told him the police would be in touch.

"I couldn’t afford a lawyer, and I didn’t see a reason to," McClure said. "I just felt I’m going to walk in there because I’m not guilty of anything."

McClure now drives tanker trucks for a Twin Falls-based company.

After the interview with Hailey police, he thought he was pretty much off the hook, he said, because police lab work had so far been inconclusive. Then, he came home Tuesday night of last week, he said, and his "phone machine was going nuts." Acquaintances told him a television news program in Twin Falls had apparently picked up the story and reported almost everything but his name.

"So I called my [new] supervisor. I wasn’t going to say anything about this until something concrete turns up," he said, "because I didn’t want to lose this job, basically because of misconceptions about trucks or my own personal character."

But the supervisor didn’t fire him.

When asked if he feels any sense of relief at that, he said, "yeah, I do. Like I said, I still don’t know where [the police are] going to go with this."

Still, he said, he potentially will have to live with the fact that a truck he was driving killed a nine-year-old boy. Or, he may never know for sure. The prospect, apparently, has weighty implications for both his soul and his livelihood.

"I’ve never been married, and I’ve never had children, so I can’t fathom that kind of loss," he said. "But at the same time, I can’t feel any guilt. If I had seen it and did not stop, then yes."

For a few days after the accident, McClure said he considered giving up truck driving, because it can be dangerous.

"You’re constantly looking at that," he said, "every time you get behind the wheel. Am I going to die today? Is somebody else going to get killed?"

Hailey police have said they are motivated in their investigation to reach a sense of "closure" both for Boyd’s mother, and for the community.

"At this point," he said, "I don’t know what closure is going to mean. This is not something that anything in my life has prepared me for. I don’t seek out attention. I’m a private person. But in this instance, I did not want to wait. I wanted to step forward and talk."

 

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