Another tragic Thanksgiving: Hanover couple still seeking driver who killed their daughter

Ginger and Josh Wright's 4-year-old died just two days before Thanksgiving last year, hit just outside their Hanover home by someone driving a white van who fled the scene.

Twelve months later, the police still haven't arrested anyone for Dakota Wright's death, despite a year-long investigation.

Nothing will ease the inexorable pain the Wrights feel over losing their child, but the question weighs heavy on them: Who is responsible for their devastating loss?

"People still call and ask us how we are doing," Ginger said.

Last Thanksgiving, they grieved alone in their room, while a sea of visitors went in and out of their house through the day, leaving behind gifts of food for the holiday.

They would be downstairs with their visitors just long enough to pick at some food and then retreat back to their room. They don't expect this year to be much different.

"It's a horrible time of year to us now, and we feel as if there isn't much to celebrate anymore," she said.

Hanover Borough Police have been investigating a person of interest since the day after the fatal hit-and-run. Court documents show that a white van was impounded and searched after being pulled over twice that night. Physical evidence was collected, including a long hair, consistent with Dakota's hair, from the grill of the white van. ​​​​

But no arrest has been made.

"To us, (Dakota's death) will never be old news," Josh said.

The biggest hindrance in the investigation is the lack of witnesses, said Chad Martin, Hanover Borough police chief.

“There is a suspect, but there is just not enough there to connect the dots,” Martin said.

And so the question remains: Who killed Dakota?

***

On Nov. 22, 2016, Josh and Ginger were watching TV when they heard screaming. It was about 7 p.m. They opened the front door, and Josh thought he heard Dakota crying, but it was Dakota's 18-year-old sister, Natalie Meckley. She told them Dakota had been hit.

Josh ran out to Princess Street, saw Dakota lying there, scooped up his baby girl and ran inside.

“I didn’t want to leave her (in the road) to get hit again,” Josh said.

He laid her on the couch and performed CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

"Please let her be OK," he thought to himself. "God, don't take my baby."

***

Earlier that day, Dakota and her sister, Natalie, had planned to take a trip to the York Galleria Mall in the late afternoon with two family friends.

Stopping at a gas station on the way, they decided to skip the mall and eat at Taco Bell instead, two sisters spending quality time with each other. They were goofing around and singing Dakota’s favorite song, “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri.

"Darling, don't be afraid, I have loved you for a thousand years; I'll love you for a thousand more..."

When they returned home, Natalie parked her dad's blue sedan along the curb on Princess Street. Dakota climbed out and stood near the car while Natalie leaned inside to grab her purse.

Natalie didn’t even realize what happened next. She heard a noise but assumed it was a trash can or a car scraping another car, she said. She looked down the road, saw something and walked over to it.

It was Dakota.

“I couldn’t breathe for a minute. I couldn’t … realize what happened,” Natalie said.

Once what happened sunk in, she ran toward the house screaming for her parents.

The rest of the night was a blur for Natalie, who laid on the sidewalk crying. Police questioned her, then she went inside.

“Everyone was like, 'Don’t look over there, don’t look over there, there is blood, you don’t want to see it,'” Natalie said.

Natalie continued upstairs and was still in a blur until Ginger called from the hospital and told her Dakota was dead.

"It's been crap really since, especially not knowing who did it," Ginger said.

***

A van was driving on Princess Street, coming from Queen Street, and struck Dakota as she got out of the car, according to an accident report Hanover police filed with PennDOT.

The van hit Dakota and dragged her beneath it, tearing her clothes and causing severe head injuries before she came to rest near the center of the street.

The van did not slow or stop as it fled the area, according to the accident report.

In those first seconds that Josh and Ginger found their daughter in the street, they had hope. “We thought it would be minor,” Josh said. “Never thought she would be dead in the middle of the road.”

Several 911 calls were made, and Hanover Borough Police were dispatched just after 7 p.m.

When Officer Matthew Waltersdorff arrived at the house, he continued the CPR her father had started.

When the ambulance arrived, Waltersdorff picked up Dakota and rushed her outside. She had no pulse, she wasn’t breathing, and she was bleeding heavily.

Medics immediately performed life-saving measures and quickly assessed that Dakota's skull was crushed. They attempted to suction blood from her airway, but there was just too much.

Medics transported Dakota to Hanover Hospital, away from her home and past the scene of the accident that would take her life.

Dakota was declared dead at 7:26 p.m.

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Waltersdorff secured the scene and street to preserve evidence, blocking the area with crime scene tape.

Detective Jared Auman began collecting and documenting evidence. He took photos of the scene, including the street, trail of blood smears, drag marks, drops of blood and other cars that were parked on the street at the time of impact, the police report states.

Auman and Waltersdorff placed 16 evidence markers at the scene, and a visual path was marked on the road to show the point where Dakota was hit to the point where she was lying when her sister found her.

Police spoke to witnesses at the scene who were in the 200 block of Princess Street at the time Dakota was hit.

Witnesses reported hearing a "thump" and screaming. They saw a white van that they described as a work van with a ladder rack, traveling about 30 to 35 mph. One witness also described the driver as a white man with facial hair, possibly a beard.

“If (the driver) had stopped, I probably would have been able to forgive him,” Josh said. “The fact that it was a hit-and-run makes it worse.”

***

The next day, Nov. 23, Sgt. Craig A. Culp applied for a search warrant through District Judge Dwayne Dubs.

About six hours after Dakota was hit, a van was impounded by West Manheim Township Police following a DUI arrest. Hanover police, believing the van matched the description of the van in the hit-and-run, wanted to search for evidence.

In the search warrant, Culp explained why he believed they had probable cause to search the van that had been impounded:

Initially, at 7:29 p.m. Nov. 22, Penn Township Police officer John Carbaugh stopped a white utility van based on a "be-on-the-lookout" (BOLO) alert for a white van.

The police pulled over the van near Beck Mill and Cooper roads. The driver of the van was a white man with a beard, and he had a passenger.

Officers Carbaugh and Travis Berwager inspected the van and saw no significant damage. The driver told police they were coming from Maryland, and the officers released them.

When Carbaugh and Berwager pulled over the van, Hanover Borough Police were immediately notified and the decision was made to release the driver, according to Penn Township Police Chief James Laughlin.

"At that time, there were no signs of impairment," Laughlin said.

At 7:32 p.m., York County Emergency Services put out updated BOLO alerts based on witness descriptions of the van and driver.

***

According to the search warrant, at 8:30 p.m., Culp met with Claude Stabley, York County Chief deputy coroner, at Hanover Hospital to gather clothing that Dakota was wearing at the time of the hit-and-run.

Culp described Dakota as small in stature with long dirty blonde or light brown hair; she had suffered severe head injuries as a result of the crash.

Dakota was pronounced dead in the emergency room. Her cause of death was deemed multiple blunt force injuries, and the manner of death was determined accidental, Stabley said.

“It was such a tragic incident. She was such a beautiful girl,” Stabley said.

***

At about 1:50 a.m. Nov. 23, West Manheim Township Police patrolman Shawn Ricketts saw a white van traveling in the 1800 block of Baltimore Pike in Hanover, according to the search warrant.

The van seemed to match the hit-and-run BOLO, and Ricketts started to pursue it. The van crossed the double yellow line on Pumping Station Road twice, and he pulled the van over.

The driver and van were the same as the driver and van Penn Township Police officer Carbaugh had pulled over about six hours earlier.

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Ricketts noticed a copper scouring pad near the driver's center console, which is often used when smoking crack cocaine.

The driver again told police he was coming from Maryland, and when Ricketts asked the driver where he was at about 7 p.m. the previous day, he said: Westminster, Maryland.

After performing field sobriety tests, Ricketts took the driver to the hospital for his blood to be drawn then to be processed for DUI.

The Evening Sun is not identifying the driver of the white van because he has not been charged in connection with Dakota's death.

The van was impounded at the West Manheim Township Police Department. At that time, a plain view search of the exterior of the van was conducted, which resulted in the finding of a long hair embedded in the front grill, along with minor front end damage.

Culp saw photos of the hair and believed it to be consistent with Dakota’s hair.

Culp also requested the driver’s cellphone be searched and seized as evidence.

***

West Manheim Township Police arrested the driver on Nov. 23, and he was charged with multiple DUI offenses and intent to possess a controlled substance, according to an affidavit filed with District Judge James Miner.

Police discovered that he had multiple DUI charges in the past.

He was taken to York County Prison in lieu of $100,000 bail on Nov. 23, which was decreased to $10,000 on Dec. 6, according to online court documents. The driver posted his bail through bond on Dec. 7 and was released. He pleaded guilty to DUI of a controlled substance and intent to possess a controlled substance. His other charges were dismissed.

The driver was sentenced to five years of the intermediate punishment program, which includes paying costs and a fine, prison time and house arrest, documents state.

He also was sentenced to 12 months of probation.

The driver’s attorney, Marc Semke, said he doesn't know why police impounded his client’s van, other than the DUI arrest being the same night as Dakota's death.

The DUI case was put on hold to allow police to conduct their investigation on his client's van, Semke said.

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In court records of a hearing transcript, Semke informed the judge that police had his client's van because of "the investigation involving the Hanover hit-and-run that's been in the papers."

As part of the bail conditions for the DUI charges, Semke's client was required to wear a GPS monitor. In the transcripts, Semke said he believed his client's bail conditions were harsher than usual because of the investigation in Hanover.

"This investigation (Hanover hit-and-run) is hanging over us," Semke said in the transcripts.

But during the DUI plea hearing in August, Phoebe Yates, a York County assistant district attorney filling in for the main prosecutor, said the driver "was alleged to have committed a crime that he did not commit. ... And while that investigation was pending, he wasn't released from in-patient treatment and prison."

Kyle King, the York County District Attorney's chief administrator, said later that Yates wasn't very familiar with the case when she made that statement.

The case of Semke's client "being a suspect" in the hit-and-run was closed for them, Semke said in an interview in September.

But in a follow-up interview with Semke in October, he said that he cannot request the return of his client's van because "they are still investigating him."

***

Ginger said police told her they sent out DNA evidence to three labs, but it all came back inconclusive.

Martin said he shared certain aspects of the DNA information in order to help the family in what little way he could. Because of the active investigation, Martin declined to comment on more detailed questions about the DNA.

“I’d say police are at a dead end with it, but the case is still open,” Josh said.

The story continues after the video.

On May 22, Hanover police released a photo of the van that struck Dakota. Police obtained the photo from video surveillance from a camera that a neighbor had pointing toward Princess Street.

“(Police) do have surveillance videos of (the van), so they know what it looks like and what they are looking for,” Ginger said.

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She said Martin usually checks in with them about once a month to give them an update on the investigation. That is if she hasn’t called him already, she said.

“The van (in the impound lot) isn’t quite panning out the way they planned,” Ginger said.

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Princess Street is small, only about two blocks long. The Wrights believe someone must know something, and if someone is driving on their road, there is a reason for it, Josh said.

“Whether it’s somebody they know that saw something, heard something … it could eventually come out who did it,” Ginger said.

The Wrights have since moved. Outside the house on Princess Street, they left a sign, a message to the driver of the white van: "I saw that! Karma."

***

Natalie still struggles with the death of her sister.

“It’s honestly still really hard. It’s hard even to be happy, it’s hard to get through every day, it’s just to the point where I don’t even want to wake up and get out of bed because it still doesn’t feel real,” she said.

Even though they moved, Josh and Ginger said no matter where they are Dakota will always have a room.

“When we see certain things she liked, we still buy it even though she isn’t here,” Ginger said.

The lack of a culprit has caused Natalie anxiety. She has trouble comprehending how the person who hit Dakota is able to live with the fact that they killed a 4-year-old girl.

On Sept. 27, Josh announced on Facebook that a close family friend, Gavin Coffin, offered a $25,000 reward to the person who can prove who killed Dakota.

Gavin was with Dakota and Natalie the night she died. The last words Dakota spoke to him were, “I love you.”

“Everybody cared about this little girl … Dakota is not resting until she gets justice,” Gavin said.

Kaitlin Greenockle can be reached at 717-634-3086.