‘This was an old boy who served his country’: Police desperate for new leads in decades old deadly hit-and-run

Nearly two decades after a Calgary veteran was struck as he walked home from the Ogden legion, police say the case is solvable — if someone comes forward with new information.

Many Calgary police investigators over the years have tried to track down the one who left Earl Dodds to die.

The 74-year-old veteran was walking home from his local legion in the 2600 block of 78 Avenue SE just before 9:30 p.m. on April 3, 2006.

He was just blocks from his home. But he never made it.

“Earl was struck and left at the side of the road,” CPS traffic Sgt. Colin Foster told 660 NewsRadio.

A bus driver saw someone lying on the road near a crosswalk and called for help.

Foster says fire crews arrived, did CPR, and managed to get a pulse.

The veteran was rushed to hospital in critical condition, but several hours later, he was gone.

He says no explanation is appropriate for what happened.

“If you rolled and crashed, you stop, call the emergency services, call an ambulance. The ambulance gets there in what’s called the golden hour and a life is saved,” he said.

“If you crash and flee, you don’t offer assistance, someone could die because of it.”

The autopsy cited blunt force trauma as the man’s cause of death.

“This was an old boy who served his country, and somebody is callous enough to have the crash and get there, panic, but then leave the scene,” Foster said.

“Earl was still alive when we turned up, so I don’t know how long he was there, but that person who struck Earl could have stopped, could’ve made enough fuss that police and EMS could come along and save his life.”

As of today, the driver who struck the senior has not been caught.

With few witnesses and limited evidence found at the scene, police are still hoping for a break in the case.

Foster says few witnesses and limited evidence have yet to be found. But police haven’t given up and are still hoping for a break in the case — a chance to hold the driver who fled accountable.

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if you’re driving a regular saloon-type car or a pickup truck, you know you’ve hit somebody, so there is never this ‘Oh no, I didn’t know what I hit.’ You knew. It’s as simple as that,” he said.

“To be so callous as in this particular instance where … you got somebody who’s in his 70s, he didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve to be struck by a car and left to die on the side of the road. And I’m hoping that somebody somewhere will know something about this.”

Anyone with information about this hit-and-run incident is asked to call police at 403-266-1234 or leave a tip anonymously through Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.