Ryne San Hamel, the motorist who killed cyclist Bobby Cann in a May 2013 crash while driving roughly twice the speed limit with a blood-alcohol level also about double the legal limit, was sentenced at a hearing in late January. After pleading guilty to reckless homicide and aggravated DUI but before being sentenced, San Hamel addressed Cann’s family to provide a tearful—and graphic—account of trying to save the cyclist’s life.
Security video from a nearby restaurant shows that after coming to a stop in front of Yojimbo’s Garage bike shop, San Hamel got out of his car and walked over to Cann. He was followed immediately by shop owner Marcus Moore, and soon afterward by Northwestern Memorial Hospital nurse Julie Rolf, who’d been driving southeast on Clybourn.
There’s just one problem: both Moore and Rolf say San Hamel’s account of his actions wasn’t true.
“I used my right forefinger and middle finger to scoop out the blood,” he says. “It was pretty messy.”
“To be evenhanded here, maybe in his mind [San Hamel] thinks he was doing more than he actually did,” Moore concedes. But he’s inclined to believe that the driver intentionally lied in court. “It makes me sick to my stomach to think that he would pull off that kind of act in front of the family of the deceased.”
Cann’s family intends to file a wrongful death lawsuit. Their attorney, Todd Smith, of the firm Power Rogers & Smith, says it would be “premature” to comment on what effect, if any, the crash witnesses’ statements might have on the civil case. Although San Hamel wasn’t under oath when he made his statement, “it’s certainly troubling if he looked at the family in court, as he did, and wasn’t telling the truth,” Smith says.
