GULF SHORES, Ala. – Unlike the Kenny Myers case in Orange Beach, the hit-and-run death of retired 53-year-old firefighter Michael Hoeft was, for almost a week anyway, a real “who done it?”

For Gulf Shores Police Department detectives Sgt. Jason Woodruff and Chad Lambert, it was an all-consuming effort to find the vehicle involved in the Feb. 21 fatality and who owned that vehicle. Hoeft was riding along County Road 4 near his home when he was struck and killed.

“We haven’t really had one like that where it was all-consuming,” Woodruff said. “Every single detective in this building was probably assigned to it for five of the seven days.”

Exhaustive police work and constant attention to the case ended up in the arrest of Melvin Dennis Hutcheson, 52, of Gulf Shores. Hutcheson was charged with felony leaving the scene of an accident and is out on $5,000 bond pending presentation of his case to a Baldwin County grand jury sometime this fall.

Woodruff believes the case is a solid one for proving felony leaving the scene of an accident.

“We’re still working to see if we can prove more but it’s got to be seen by a grand jury,” he said. “We can put him there. We’ve got multiple people that saw leaving a location east of there and traveling west on that road at that time.”

In many ways, Woodruff is still living the case. Just recently the District Attorney’s office requested all of Gulf Shores’ files on the case.

“I still think about him,” Woodruff said, picking up a flyer from a memorial service for Hoeft off his desk. “That case was a heck of a week. We worked it literally for seven days.”

The first priority was searching the crime scene, but the incident occurred at dusk and darkness fell as the investigation began.

“Chad Lambert and I spent hours in the ditch out there that night and on the road just trying to get everything we could,” Woodruff said. “We knew once we left there was going to be a slim chance of finding anything although stuff was found the next day in the daylight.

“You have to search it again.”

The incident occurred on a Tuesday and as Wednesday turned into Thursday, Woodruff was getting antsy.

“Wednesday was a blur because we had nothing,” he said. “By Thursday I was worried. I was thinking ‘man I don’t know. Tell me this person hasn’t gotten away from us.’

“We were finding out what kind of car we were looking for that day. Thursday, we put it out we’re still looking and dispatch had run us a search of everyone in this area, every Ford Explorer.”

A call to the police department gave detectives their first connection to Hutcheson.

“A person called (Friday) morning and said, ‘hey there’s a guy that lives in my apartment complex, he has a vehicle like that and I haven’t seen it since Tuesday night.’

“We were curious about that. I go through the stack and his name’s in there, it’s one of the ones the dispatchers located.”

Hoeft’s distraught family, three sons and a daughter-in-law, made it to town and were desperate to help the police find out who had caused Hoeft’s death.

Amanda Hoeft, wife of Michael Hoeft’s son Josh, joined the family in scouring the roadside for any evidence to help police. Her bare foot plunged into the mud and struck what would be a pivotal piece of evidence.

“There were four pieces that went together to form a piece,” Woodruff said. “It was the only place on the whole light that would’ve had it in it. It was the only part that broke, too.

“We had three of the pieces and her piece fit in and it made it complete. We had workable numbers and a search in progress . Her piece fit in and gave us the whole number.”

That number helped identify Hutcheson as the owner of the vehicle.

Locating the vehicle presented another quandary. And Hutcheson wasn’t talking.

“He was polite, but he wouldn’t make a single statement and I’m sure he instructed his wife to do the same thing because she wouldn’t talk to us,” Woodruff said. “He also wouldn’t produce the vehicle for us to look at. It was just gone.”

Woodruff said police searched extensively for the vehicle locally including aerial searches in case it was ditched somewhere in the countryside. A statewide alert was also issued.

That weekend a deputy in Etowah County responding to a domestic disturbance call happened upon a similar vehicle and remembered the alert.

“I’m sitting on the side of my bed with my phone and this deputy is taking pictures of it with his phone and texting me,” Woodruff said. “And when I saw it I knew it. The only place I knew where that light goes was broken.”

Hutcheson was arrested and made bond on Feb. 28. He has been free since and, Woodruff said, has changed residences but still lives in the area.

Besides his three sons Matthew, 30, Josh, 28 and Nicholas, 27, Hoeft leaves behind a wife and eight grandchildren. Two more grandchildren were on the way at the time of his death.