Dozens of witnesses called police with tips, hoping the mystery speedboat owner would be caught and brought to justice.

But their help alone wouldn't be enough to unravel details of one of the most spectacular boat wrecks on the Ohio River in years. Instead, it would take an involved, three-month investigation to build a solid case against the boat owner who hit the smaller craft the evening of June 27, 2003.

On Tuesday - 15 months after the speedboat sliced into the smaller craft, injuring six adults and frightening a child aboard - prosecutors will recommend that its operator be sentenced to 10 years in prison for assault and endangering the public.

Glenn Colann

Nearly everyone involved - the injured boaters, police officers and prosecutors - say the conclusion of the case is the result of a scrappy little police department leading a first-class investigation.

Dayton Police Chief Mark Brown credits unrelenting investigators and especially an outside boat-crash expert who joined the probe in September 2003.

"Obviously, my little city can't bring a case like this on its own," said Brown, who oversees an eight-officer department in this city of 6,000. "We are going to beg and borrow any expertise we don't have to bring a case like this to justice."

Driver was remembered

The help started with an incensed public.

No one initially knew the boat owner's name, but people remembered his cockiness.

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They also remembered the sexy boat he pulled behind his blue pickup truck. According to police, the man seemed to be everywhere that day:

• Employees at Four Seasons marina in Columbia Tusculum called to say the man failed to pay to launch his boat that morning. Rivertowne marina's owners said he didn't pay a docking fee.

• Vacationers from Florida and Virginia, and the mayor of Moscow, Ohio, gave accounts of how the boat's owner was rude and blocked busy boat ramps along the Ohio River that day and the next.

• A Pennsylvania man said a pickup hauling the boat nearly ran him off Interstate 71 in Ohio the day after the boat crash.

• A clerk at a gas station along I-71 said the boat's owner caused a near-brawl by blocking all the pumps with the boat he was towing the day after the crash.

"The boat's owner left a trail of (ticked)-off people all the way home," Dayton Police Sgt. Raleigh Barnett said. "These people remembered the boat, and called police, because of the arrogance of the owner."

Barnett quickly identified the boat's owner as Glenn Colann, a Columbus-area car dealer who owned a 40-foot Baja Outlaw speedboat named Snap Decision.

And on July 1, 2003, four days after the crash, Colann turned his boat over to police. But Colann told officers he hadn't hit another boat, police said. When investigators asked him about damage to Snap Decision, Colann said he thought he'd hit a log in the river.

Investigators did not immediately arrest their suspect.

Instead, they set out to gather more clues. Three months later, on Oct. 16, 2003, a grand jury indicted Colann on charges of assault and wanton endangerment.

"From the outside looking in, one might think this (investigation) took a long time," said Brian Maher, the owner of the boat that was rammed. "In fact, that's just how you do it right. This guy (Colann) wanted to get away with this. If police hadn't done thorough work, there is no telling what would have happened."

Colann, 55, entered an "Alford plea" Aug. 4to four counts of second-degree assault, three counts of fourth-degree assault and seven counts of wanton endangerment . With the plea, he did not admit guilt but acknowledged that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him.

Colann, who declined a request for an interview, is to be sentenced by Judge William Wehr.Colann will be eligible to appear before the parole board after serving two years.

Other agencies helped

Brown doesn't know how much the boat investigation cost, in part, because the city didn't pay for it all. But he estimates the final price is easily $60,000. For one thing, Barnett's 56 interviews generated 1,500 pages of transcribed tapes.

In addition, the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office used its helicopter to take aerial photographs of the river, and Kenton County Police loaned a mobile forensic lab.

Meanwhile, Sam DeWalt was loaned from the Ohio Division of Watercraft in Sandusky to help on the case. He reconstructed the wreck, analyzing weather and river conditions, the course of the boats and damage to each craft.

"You don't have skid marks as you do on the roadway, but you do have a tremendous amount of evidence," he said. "When the boats came into contact, they transferred evidence from one to another."

DeWalt concluded that the person driving the speedboat should have been able to spot Maher's boat a half-mile away and stop in eight to 10 boat lengths. He concluded, too, that the speedboat driver never took evasive action to miss the smaller boat.

DeWalt's suspicions were confirmed when he examined the engine of Colann's boat. Inside a strainer, designed to remove large particles from water used to cool the engine, he found glass from the broken windows of Maher's boat.

"There was no doubt (Colann's) boat hit and ran over the small one," DeWalt said. "I had 13 contact points of the vessels that perfectly matched. It was like matching 13 points on a fingerprint."

"Happy to be alive"

DeWalt's findings coincided with Maher's version of events.

Maher; his wife, Debra; son, Jesse; three relatives; and a friend from Michigan were spending a day on the family's new 21-foot Maxum Sport Deck pleasure boat when, they say, they were run over by the bigger boat.

The group was returning to the California Yacht Club after dinner at Hooters floating restaurant in Newport. It was about 11 p.m., and the boat was going no more than 10 mph about 75 feet from the Kentucky shore at Dayton.

Maher claims in a civil suit filed in connection with the wreck that the speedboat charged out of the dark, collided with and ran up and over his boat. Maher alleges in his suit that Colann was on a "mission to get drunk" that day.

Maher's boat didn't sink, but everyone was knocked to the floor as the speedboat ripped away the windshield of the boat and the taller items on the craft. He was most seriously injured when the flesh of his right hand, down to the bones, was ripped off. The others, like Maher's wife, were cut up in the crash. Doctors have grafted skin from Maher's hip to his hand.

Maher's lawsuit claims Colann was on his boat with two friends.

After interviews with witnesses, Dayton police concluded that earlier on the day of the crash, Colann was driving his boat up and down the river, challenging other boaters to race him, zig-zagging through boat traffic and driving at a high rate of speed.

Maher said the emotional scars are hardest to get over.

"We are all back to work as healthy as we are going to get," said Maher, a fifth-grade math and science teacher at Wyoming Middle School. "There are some of us, like me, that are never going to be the same, but are just happy to be alive."

DeWalt has investigated more than 300 boat crashes. To him, this case stands out because the man who caused the wreck never stopped to try to help the victims.

"It is easier to forgive that you hit a boat than to forgive leaving a boat-full of injured people behind," DeWalt said.

"This gentleman left seven people behind. He didn't know if they were dead."

E-mail jhannah@enquirer.com