Questions persist after hit and run
By ANDREW MCGINN
GRAND JUNCTION — Chances are, the sidewalk on 16th Street North will be covered with snow, water or mud.
That probably explains why Travis Fincel was walking on the side of the street that night in mid-December.
There still isn’t a logical explanation for what happened next.
“The guy leaving the scene makes everything worse,” Greene County Sheriff Jack Williams said Tuesday, a day after Fincel, 46, was laid to rest, having never regained consciousness from a hit and run near Sandoe Street East in Grand Junction.
The driver of the northbound 2015 Dodge Ram that hit Fincel was later located up the street at Casey’s, and was identified as 72-year-old Robert Aaron Kinnick, of Grand Junction.
“He knew he hit him,” Williams said. “He just thought he grazed him.”
Fincel was walking on the street, according to Williams, but by no means was he in Kinnick’s lane.
The Iowa State Patrol is leading the investigation into what happened about 8:10 p.m. on Dec. 15. A spokeswoman for the patrol’s District 4 headquarters in Denison said this week the investigation is still open, and that no charges have been filed.
Fincel’s large, extended family made the decision last week to remove his life support. He died on Jan. 7 at Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines.
“I have so many questions,” said Tina King, of Rippey, Fincel’s former girlfriend, co-parent and all-around best friend.
One thing, however, isn’t in question — Fincel was well-loved.
“I knew he knew a lot of people, but I never expected to see the amount of support that was there,” King said of Monday’s funeral service, at which 145 well-wishers signed the guestbook despite COVID-19 precautions.
Fincel’s service may have been the first time Pantera’s blistering “Walk” has ever been heard within the walls of the Slininger-Schroeder Funeral Home.
“Travy,” as he was known around Grand Junction, was a perpetual “smartass” with the proverbial heart of gold who loved his kids deeply, according to King — even if those kids didn’t share a single strand of his DNA.
Of the six kids who lost their dad last week, only two were biological.
“Blood means absolutely nothing,” King said.
Fincel, who had worked at Neese Inc. the past couple of years and at Rueter’s for 10 years before that, was fiercely proud of his kids, plus his four grandkids.
“Everybody knew he would not want to live like this,” King said of the family’s reason to end life support. “Everybody knew this wasn’t Dad. He wouldn’t want to be a burden on anybody else.”
King first met Fincel in 1990, and they eventually spent 15 years together and shared a child. But a funny thing happened a few years after the couple’s split — Fincel re-entered the picture as King’s best friend and co-parent and never again left.
“He was a great man. He really was,” King said. “We did everything as a family.”
The family’s open-couch policy applied even to strangers, like a trucker who found himself stranded in Iowa one Christmas.
And if you left the home hungry, King said, it was your own fault.
King said her new boyfriend wasn’t given an option of saying no.
That meant Fincel even joined King, her new boyfriend and the kids for family pictures.
Two years ago, King said, there were 13 or 14 people pictured on the family’s Christmas card.
“From our dysfunctional family to yours,” it proudly read.
As King puts it, “We put the fun in dysfunctional.”
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