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Police: Hit-skip driver ID’d

The Chronicle-Telegram
Elyria, Ohio
October 14, 2015

by Steve Fogarty

OBERLIN — Police say the vehicle and driver involved in a fatal weekend hit-skip crash that claimed the life of a well-known Oberlin man and bicyclist has been found.

The Elyria Post of the Ohio Highway Patrol reported Tuesday that a tip led investigating troopers to a 2014 black Ford Focus and its owner, Ronald Dicenzo, 76, of Oberlin.

The vehicle was initially found parked in front of an Oberlin residence by Oberlin police, according to an Ohio Highway Patrol release.

Patrol officers responded to the scene, and additional investigation determined the Ford Focus was the same vehicle that struck Charles Startup, 70, from behind as Startup rode his bicycle along Butternut Ridge Road on Saturday afternoon.

Dicenzo was also identified as the driver of the car at the time of the fatal crash, in which the vehicle struck the bicyclist from behind and then sped away after momentarily slowing, according to a witness.

“We are 100 percent positive he (Dicenzo) was the driver at the time,” Ohio Highway Patrol Sgt. Tim Hoffman said.

Startup, who worked as a licensed social worker, was flown from the scene by Life Flight to MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, where he was pronounced dead a short time later.

Dicenzo is cooperating with investigators and has not been charged yet, according to Ohio Highway Patrol Sgt. Tim Hoffman, who said unspecified charges are pending.

Dicenzo is not being held, according to Hoffman, who declined comment when asked whether Dicenzo had given any statements as to why he left the scene of the accident.

“We’re still working to examine the vehicle and going back to interview witnesses,” Hoffman said. “We want to get everything together before we put anything else out.”

Dicenzo was alone at the time of the fatal crash, Hoffman said.

Startup and Dicenzo lived a few hundred yards from each other in Oberlin. Startup, an Oberlin College graduate, lived in the 200 block of West College Street.

Dicenzo lives on nearby Cedar Street, according to the Ohio Highway Patrol.

A Ronald Dicenzo was listed at the Oberlin College website as an emeritus professor of East Asian Studies, but Scott Wargo, director of public relations for the college, was unable to verify that the Oberlin College professor was the same person.

Gary Goodwin was expecting a call from his longtime friend Charles Startup last weekend.

“He had just been in Portland, Ore., to see another (Peace Corps) volunteer who lives on the West Coast,” Goodwin said. “He flew home Friday.”

“I was anxiously awaiting a call from him,” Goodwin said. “And then it happened Saturday.”

A Rochester, N.Y., resident, Goodwin and Startup were among 23 American Peace Corps volunteers selected from an initial pool of 140 from around the country to spend two years in a number of remote villages in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India in the late 1960s to help impoverished people improve their ability to farm.

The friends were all in their early 20s when they went to India to help teach techniques for irrigating farmland.

“We worked under a hand-built dam that was one of the biggest in the world at the time,” Goodwin said.

“It was a big culture shock for us,” Goodwin said. “We were going to some very remote villages and were pretty scared, to put it bluntly. We had no idea what it would be like where we were going. We were way out in the wilderness.”

“We worked in grass huts to simulate the environment we’d be in,” Goodwin said of training the group received in California. “Not many of us had a farming background.”

Startup later worked with a Catholic school in India, and performed land surveys before returning to the United States.

Remaining in the Peace Corps for another seven years, Goodwin worked in Montessori education for a time before returning to the United States, where he continued in that field.

“The loss of Charlie is a grievous one for us who were bound closely together in our lives in small villages that were set in almost feudal-like times,” Goodwin wrote in an email to the Chronicle-Telegram after seeing an online version of the story about Startup’s death.

“Bike-riding was his outlet and his exercise,” Goodwin said. “He knew all the roads around Oberlin and rode them daily.”

Startup’s clients included alcoholics and adults who had been abused as children, according to Goodwin.

Goodwin and Startup had seen each other more often in recent years, thanks in part to a couple of reunions of Peace Corps workers, as well as during trips Startup took to New Canaan, Conn., where his mother, brother and sister lived.

“I saw him quite a bit more recently than earlier on, as we were so busy with our careers,” Gibson said.

Startup had also traveled to Washington, D.C., to see his son Josh, who took a job with the U.S. Department of Commerce in San Francisco, according to Goodwin.

“On his way back, he came to Rochester with another Oberlin friend and we went to a park in our area and had a good time here,” Goodwin said.

Startup was described by Goodwin as someone whose personality was “leavened by a great sense of humor and lots of energy, but quiet wisdom.”

Despite the “unspeakable … and hugely pointless finality” of Startup’s death, Goodwin wrote that “a world of love is around him in his friends, and in his very talented and wonderful son Josh and daughter-in-law, Mai.”

Al Gibson, longtime owner of Gibson’s Food Mart & Bakery in downtown Oberlin, recalled conversations he had with Startup on the street or during stops into the bakery for coffee.

“He lived two blocks from my store,” Gibson said. “We weren’t that close but I always enjoyed having a chat with him.”

Gibson also spoke of Startup’s passion for bicycling.

“He rode all over the country,” Gibson said. “It was a real passion of his. He’d ride 50 to 100 or 200 miles. He’d do a lot of it by himself.”

“It was quite a tragedy,” Gibson said of the weekend crash that took Startup’s life.

A pair of memorial services is planned for Startup. One will take place in New Canaan, Conn., Goodwin said, with another to be held the weekend of Oct. 24 in Oberlin.

“Justice should be done in this case, though no justice is sufficient of course,” Goodwin wrote. “Charles is onto another reality.”

NEWS STORY - CHARLES STARTUP