DENVER — A spokesman for the Colorado State Patrol (CSP) now says the agency is absolutely confident a Lamborghini driver wasn’t driving 190 mph when he got a warning from a CSP trooper.
Pictures of a “190 in a 65” warning circulated online in November, leading people to wonder why a trooper would let a driver off the hook for traveling at such a speed.
The driver, James Teague, is seen bragging about the warning in a YouTube video, which appears to be shot the same day.
“Cop pulls me over and he goes, 'Do you know how fast you were going?'” Teague, wearing a hat with the word “Lambros” on it, is heard telling other exotic car enthusiasts. “I go, '200.' He goes, '190.'"
The trooper told his superiors that Teague had approached him and asked him for a souvenir that day, so he wrote the warning.
In an interview with 9NEWS, Teague initially said he was speeding, but after he was told that CSP said he wasn’t, his story changed.
“We'll go with his story - you don't never go against local authorities," Teague said in our phone interview.
9NEWS obtained copies of dashcam videos shot by Master Trooper Chris Wright on the date of the warning. CSP released two of the three videos recorded that day.
One video shows Wright checking on an abandoned car. The other appears to show him following up with the driver of a tractor that appears to have dropped a load of dirt on the highway.
The third video, which CSP didn’t release to 9NEWS, is unrelated, according to White. It contains a video of a separate traffic stop that hasn’t been adjudicated. Radio traffic from Wright that day, also obtained by 9NEWS, appears to back up that claim.
“If the lights turned on on the patrol car, or if the patrol car reaches a certain speed, the camera automatically turns on and there would be footage of it,” CSP Spokesman Trooper Blake White said.
There is no video of the Lamborghini on Wright’s dashcam.
“The fact that there wasn’t video kinda shows this didn’t happen,” White said. “We didn’t stop a car going that fast.”
CSP provided 9NEWS a photo of Wright posing next to the Lamborghini in question.
In that picture, Wright’s patrol car is in front of the Lamborghini. The standard protocol for a traffic stop would be to pull up behind the vehicle, according to White.
“The trooper was pulled over on the side of the road and this Lamborghini driver, affectionately known as Lambro, pulled behind and started having a conversation, so it was just a friendly conversation,” White said.
The only part of Teague’s YouTube story proven by available records is when he tells his fellow exotic car enthusiasts that Wright had heard from dispatchers that exotic cars were coming.
In the radio traffic, obtained by 9NEWS, a dispatcher tells Wright another trooper received reports about “about 100 different exotic cars” driving westbound on I-70.
White says the untrue story told by Teague doesn’t dismiss what the trooper did in the first place.
“We own the fact that the trooper made a poor decision doing this,” White said, saying Wright faced administrative action.
SUGGESTED VIDEOS | Full Episodes of Next with Kyle Clark