Amy Hadden Marsh KDNK and Bianca Godina Sol del Valle
Updated: June 3, 2026 4:36 PM
Rifle resident victim of hit and run case still unsolved, family awaits answers
Editor’s note: The original radio piece stated that KDNK was one of the media outlets that broadcast about Ramon Chacon’s death. In fact, KDNK did not broadcast the story at that time. Part 1 of this series stated that Gabriela Chacon started the Chacon Cubano Facebook page specifically for help. In fact,that was her husband’s personal page that she added to after his death.
On May 7, 2024, eight days after Ramon Chacon died as result of a hit and run near the Rifle Bridge, his family and friends held a protest outside the Rifle Police Department. They wanted answers.
Jessica Gonzalez, Chacon’s sister-in-law, confronted then-police chief Debra Funston during the protest, a video of which was posted to Facebook. She told Funston that the PD could be doing more. She said that the PD was dragging its feet because Chacon and his family are Mexican.
Funston has since retired as Chief of Police. She was unavailable for comment on the Chacon case.
Jessica told Sol del Valle that she wanted to help Gabriela, Chacon’s widow and mother of their two daughters, who would go to the police department and come home with no answers. “They just kept telling us, ‘We don’t have anything yet, we’ll call you,’ and that’s how they kept us waiting,” she told Sol del Valle. “So we held the protest, and the chief commander was angry.” (Jessica spoke to Sol del Valle in Spanish, which was translated for this story.)
The protest video shows Funston explaining what the PD has been doing, that they have more than one investigator on the case, that they reached out to the public and checked local camera footage. She added that the PD also has other cases to work on. She also stated, “I’m just being honest – the investigator working on it does not speak Spanish.”
Media outlets reported on the crash right after it happened. Rifle PD requested leads from the public four times on Facebook until about 10 days after the incident. The family created a poster seeking tips and offering a reward, which was picked up by Rifle PD on June 29, 2024 and again ten days later.
Jessica also put the poster on Facebook. Gabriela created a Facebook page called Chacon Cubano, specifically for help. Her posts ended in July, 2024.
The family started a GoFundMe page, which raised over $26,000 for funeral expenses. Donations have been paused. Gabriela told Sol del Valle that the last contact she had with Rifle PD was in July, 2024.
So, she and Jessica went back to the PD late last month and were told the case was classified as “closed inactive” in August, 2025. No one had been told about that.
Two records requests filed by KDNK — in August, 2024 and September, 2025 — produced a partially redacted incident report - no witness statements or anything else. In late April, interim police chief Mike Kuper agreed to an interview with KDNK but canceled it a few days later, stating that the case was “active”. Only after Jessica and Gabriela went to the PD in late May did Angela Mills, Rifle PD public information officer, tell KDNK about the changed status. Gabriela said she thought Rifle PD was no longer working on the case. But, that’s not what “closed inactive” means, according to the PD.
There are several kinds of closed cases, like closed with an arrest or an arrest warrant issued and closed if the case is unfounded. “Closed inactive” is a little different..
Investigating a homicide similar to investigating a hit-and-run
Angela Hawkins, program director for the Colorado Law Enforcement Training Academy at Colorado Mountain College in Breckenridge, told KDNK in an interview that “closed inactive” means that leads have been exhausted but case status can be changed to active with new information. “But you know, the thing about the cold case is that the leads have stopped coming in and there's no new direction to follow,” she said.
Speaking hypothetically, Hawkins painted a complex picture of a hit-and-run investigation. “From the beginning, it's almost like a homicide investigation, right? Where, hey, we have a loss of life here, so let's preserve our scene and let's get in the experts if we have that resource,” she explained. “And then documenting everything, you know, and that's the very initial part, right? Now we start our reporting and all of the requests for things that we're gonna need to follow up.’
She said follow-up can take a long time, depending on the circumstances of the case and if the police need to hire outside help.
Moore-Vorley homicide case took five years to finish
A recent, unrelated homicide case in western Garfield County is an example of these complexities. The case had a long timeframe. It came to completion in late May, almost five years to the day after Wayne Moore was found shot to death in his car on Highway 6 west of Parachute.
“We had a handful of shell casings that we presumed at the time was from the murder weapon and that's all we had,” recalled Josh Craine, investigation division commander for the Garfield County Sheriff. “We didn't have physical evidence otherwise. We didn't have any tire
tracks,footprints. We didn't have fingerprints. We didn't have DNA. We didn't have any witnesses. It was truly a whodunit-type situation.”
Witnesses who first found Moore’s body came forward. The investigative team established a timeframe for the incident. They found Moore’s associates, where he worked. “And it was just a lot of following what little teeny tiny breadcrumbs that we could find. We got very lucky,” said Craine.
After about 18 months, others came forward with information that led to identifying a suspect. The case began to open up after that. Then, on May 21, 2024, exactly three years after Craine and his team found Moore dead, they arrested the suspect and took him into custody.
Two years later, John Michael Worley was found guilty of second-degree murder and tampering with physical evidence. On May 22, five years and one day after Moore was found, Worley was sentenced to 40 years behind bars.
Craine also said that a hit-and-run investigation can be similar to a homicide, like creating a timeframe and gathering data. But, mostly it’s about finding witnesses. “We are looking for someone who's willing to put themselves out there, to step up and say, ‘I know something, and I'm willing to give it to you’,” he explained. “And whether what they know, to them, may be nothing, it may be the Rosetta Stone of a case for us.”
He added that police walk a fine line when it comes to talking to the media during an active case. The media can be useful for finding more information. Other times, the case is too sensitive to reveal details. “It's not necessarily that we're stonewalling, but we do protect case information because it is ongoing,” he told KDNK. “It's like, we have a person of interest who's most likely our suspect, but if we start releasing a bunch of information, we're gonna lose anything we have.”
The downside of keeping case information quiet is that people start to fill in the gaps with their own theories. Here’s Jessica again. “I told them, ‘You’re trying to hide something. Or is it because we’re Mexican, because we’re Latino, that you don’t want to help us?’,” she told Sol del Valle. “Then they told us to control ourselves and calm down, that they were going to investigate further and stay in better communication with us.”
But, Rifle PD remains tight-lipped. And the Chacon case shows no sign of thawing.
Anyone with information related to the case can contact the Rifle Police Department at 970-625-8095 and request to speak with a detective. Tips or comments related to this story may be sent to info@soldelvalle.org or news@kdnk.org.
This is Part Two of a collaboration between KDNK and Sol del Valle, the Roaring Fork valley’s Spanish-language newspaper, and is made possible by a grant from the Colorado Media Project. Bianca Godina, editor of Sol del Valle, contributed to this report.
