# The DARK Side of Sturgis 2026 | What Happened When Everyone Went Home?

**Channel:** Complete Crime
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fQj_0sYni0
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/-fQj_0sYni0

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Sturgis After the Rally Ends
- 3:11 — Arrests, Citations, and Hidden Totals
- 10:14 — Three Fatal Crashes and a Mystery
- 18:23 — A Temporary City Built to Swell
- 24:37 — Aftermath, Decline, and Lingering Questions

## Transcript

**[0:00] Speaker A:** By far the most active night that we have seen here so far. As we have seen some incidents.

**[0:08] Speaker B:** Courtney. Courtney. If you want his information, ask him. He'll tell you his website.

**[0:15] Speaker A:** picture.

**[0:21] Speaker B:** 10 days ago, 700,000 engines roared into a town built for 7,000 people. Tonight, the streets are empty, but the paperwork is not finished. Three men did not ride home. A car was found where no car should ever be. And behind every number the police released this week, there is a story they never told you out loud. This is what happens after Sturgis goes quiet. The 86th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally officially closed on Sunday, August the 16th. By Monday morning, the crowds had thinned to almost nothing, but the numbers were only just beginning to surface. A semi-truck rolled over on Interstate 90 on Sunday evening, right in the middle of the heaviest outbound traffic of the entire 10 days, stalling the westbound lanes as thousands of riders tried to leave at the same time. Temporary traffic signals stayed active through the end of the following Monday.

**[1:13] Speaker B:** The reduced speed limits that had been in place for over a week finally lifted. On paper, that looks like cleanup. In practice, it means the town spent an extra day managing the same congestion, the same risk, and the same exhausted riders who had already been on the road for over a week straight. If you walk down Main Street at 6:00 in the morning on that final Monday, you would barely recognize the place. The vendor tents are half folded. The pavement is stained with 10 days of spilled beer and burnt rubber. A cleanup crew moves through with a slow, practiced rhythm, sweeping up the evidence of a party that already feels like it belongs to another town entirely. This is the version of Sturgis nobody films. The quiet, exhausted aftermath that comes right before every official number gets typed into a spreadsheet somewhere and filed away.

**[2:02] Speaker B:** You have probably watched a dozen rally videos this month. The chrome, the leather, the bands playing until midnight. Insert clip from 9:20 to 9:34.

**[2:14] Speaker A:** Awesome. Awesome folks, look at the party Look at the dance party that has broken out. This is crazy. This is crazy, guys. The party never ends. Here in Sturgis, South Dakota. I hope everybody was here. This is the 85th annual rally in the Black Hills. It's been going strong and it is not let me Oh, that's what

**[2:36] Speaker B:** That is the version of Sturgis everyone films and for good reason because for 10 straight nights it barely stopped moving. What you have not seen is what gets counted after the cameras stop rolling. Sturgis Police Department does not publish a single unified total. Their numbers cover only the city force. Highway Patrol tracks a separate zone. Meade County Sheriff's Office tracks something else entirely. Nobody in a position of authority ever adds all three together. The full picture of what happened during those 10 days does not exist in any one document and that gap is where this story lives.

**[3:11] Speaker B:** Through the ninth day of the rally, the Sturgis Police Department reported 493 arrests and citations. In 2025, at that same point, the number was 283. That is not a small increase. That is a jump of over 70% in a single year inside a town whose population barely changes. Break it down and the picture gets sharper. 192 non-traffic arrests, up 121 from the year before. 176 traffic arrests, up 70. 125 parking citations, up 19. And this is the detail that should stop. Calls for service, the actual number of times someone dialed for help, sat at 1,532. Almost identical to the 1,524 calls logged in 2025. The phone was not ringing more. The handcuffs were simply coming out faster. 92 of those charges belonged to people who lived within roughly 3 hours of Sturgis. Not out-of-state bikers passing through, locals, neighbors. People who live close enough to drive home and sleep in their own bed that night and still ended up in the system.

**[4:23] Speaker B:** 128 people were booked into jail across the 10 days. Nine of them on the final Saturday alone. Sturgis does not have a sprawling court system built to process a jail count that jumps by dozens overnight. It has a handful of officers, a handful of holding cells, and a permanent population that could fit inside a single stadium section. Every one of those 128 bookings meant paperwork, processing, and a phone call somewhere from a small department that was still expected to patrol the rest of the rally at the exact same time.

**[4:58] Speaker A:** Turning into a busy day for Sturgis PD. Several officers down here, they were taking a good look at this gold SUV. Several officers responded to this traffic stop. The van is out now and they thoroughly searched this SUV.

**[5:16] Speaker B:** Every arrest number you just heard was reported by a single department in a single small town in a single 10-day window. It does not include highway patrol. It does not include the sheriff. And what those other two agencies were counting is worse. Inside city limits, Sturgis Police Department logged 75 misdemeanor drug and paraphernalia arrests along with 47 felony drug arrests. That is 122 drug-related arrests from a single police force covering a few square miles of Main Street. Meanwhile, their DUI arrests actually dropped down to 37 from 58 the year before. On its own, that might look like progress. It is not. It means the danger simply moved outside city limits, onto the open highway where highway patrol was left to handle it alone. And highway patrol's numbers covering the wider zone across Western South Dakota are staggering. 221 misdemeanor drug arrests, 108 felony drug arrests, 114 DUI arrests, more than 1,700 citations, more than 4,500 written warnings.

**[6:28] Speaker B:** Combine the drug arrests from both agencies and you are looking at close to 350 separate drug cases opened during a single motorcycle rally. And that total still does not include whatever the Meade County Sheriff's Office logged on its own. Nobody sat down at the end of those 10 days and combined every agency's totals into one honest number. If they had, the true scale of what happened on those streets and highways would be impossible to ignore. Instead, the story stayed scattered across three separate filing cabinets in three separate offices, and that is exactly how a town keeps its darkest statistics quiet. South Dakota Highway Patrol's final tally for the rally period logged 73 total crashes, actually a drop of nearly 25% from the 97 crashes reported in 2025.

**[7:34] Speaker B:** 39 of those were injury crashes, 31 were non-injury. On the surface, fewer crashes meant fewer wrecks, and attendance really was down this year, roughly 9% lower through the first week compared to the 5-year average.

**[8:00] Speaker B:** But, three of those 73 crashes were fatal. Three men climbed onto their motorcycles at some point during those 10 days and never climbed off again. Fewer bikes were on those highways this year than the year before, and three men still did not make it home. That detail matters more than it might seem. A lighter crowd usually means a safer rally. Fewer riders means fewer chances for something to go wrong on the open road. This year, the odds were actually in every rider's favor, and the Black Hills claimed three lives anyway. That is not a statistic you can explain away with attendance numbers. It is a reminder that no matter how thin the crowd gets, the risk never fully disappears. Their names are James Edward Skillet, Robert Thomas Ryan, and Joshua Jordan Cornelius. And the way each of them died reveals something about this rally that no press release will ever say out loud.

**[8:54] Speaker B:** Somewhere between the campgrounds and the concerts, three men climbed onto their motorcycles for what they thought was just another ride through the Black Hills. None of them saw what was coming, and two of them died within 12 minutes of each other on a road most riders consider completely safe. Behind every statistic in the last chapter is a family that has not stopped asking questions. A jacket still hanging by a front door. A phone with unread messages nobody has the heart to delete yet.

**[9:21] Speaker A:** More people on this trip than we've ever had.

**[9:34] Speaker A:** Clean bikes, new bikes, powerful bikes.

**[9:41] Speaker B:** Serge is 2026.

**[9:43] Speaker A:** Steak and spaghetti.

**[9:55] Speaker B:** You got East Coast and you got fresh and you got fueling.

**[10:01] Speaker A:** We've got a big group this year.

**[10:04] Speaker B:** 20 bikes, 10 pumps.

**[10:06] Speaker A:** Awesome day.

**[10:07] Speaker B:** 2laneLife.com

**[10:08] Speaker A:** Let's go.

**[10:09] Speaker B:** Let's go.

**[10:14] Speaker A:** The official rally tally reduces all of that to a single line, three fatalities. But each of those three names belong to a full life that ended somewhere between a highway shoulder and a hospital that could not save him in time. James Edward Skillet was 72 years old from Shawnee, Oklahoma riding a 2003 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide. On Saturday, August the 8th at approximately 4:41 in the afternoon, he was traveling northbound in the left lane of US Highway 85 near mile marker 35, about 5 miles north of Deadwood. Ahead of him, another motorcycle began turning left. Skillet braked to avoid it, lost control, and was thrown from his bike. He was not wearing a helmet. He was not wearing a helmet. He also did not survive. Two separate crash reports filed by two separate troopers describing two men who had never met riding roads they had likely traveled dozens of times before without incident.

**[11:13] Speaker A:** Ryan had made the trip from Connecticut nearly a quarter of the way across the country to ride through country he had probably been dreaming about for months. Cornelius had come down from Minnesota, close enough that the Black Hills might have felt almost familiar to him. Neither man's experience or distance traveled changed what happened in those final seconds.

**[11:34] Speaker B:** Here we go, guys. World record Harley jump attempt.

**[11:46] Speaker B:** Nice. Did he land it? Did he land it? He landed it. Congrat- There he is. Great job. Are you okay? Hold on. Damn.

**[12:01] Speaker A:** Every rider who has ever taken a curve a little too fast, or braked a little too late, knows exactly how thin that line is. The difference between a story you tell at the campfire and a name on an official tally can be measured in feet, not miles.

**[12:20] Speaker B:** And here comes the Hells Angels, ladies and gentlemen. They are here. They have arrived. The Hells Angels are here in Sturgis. Wow.

**[12:34] Speaker A:** Check it out, guys. I told you the Hells Angels are selling merchandise at Sturgis. They got the lovely ladies hanging outside. A lot of people coming over to get shirts, leave tattoos.

**[12:46] Speaker B:** Our first man doing a great job over there.

**[12:53] Speaker B:** Right now, the Hells Angels rolling into the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. You can see these particular gentlemen all the way from Colorado. They come from all over, all over the country. And right now, they've got their headquarters set up. They've got some merchandise for sale right here on Main Street.

**[13:19] Speaker A:** Sometimes that thin line has nothing to do with the rider on the bike at all. It is about the person standing right next to it. Fatal crashes are only part of what makes a rally dangerous. Every year, law enforcement across the rally corridor deals with something harder to put a number on. The sheer volume of erratic, unpredictable behavior that shows up once the sun goes down and the drinks start flowing. Traffic stops that should take 5 minutes stretch into extended standoffs. Bystanders who were never part of the original stop suddenly insert themselves into the middle of an active police scene. Sometimes for reasons officers themselves cannot explain in the moment. This is the side of the rally the arrest statistics only hint at. 75 misdemeanor drug arrests and 47 felony drug arrests inside city limits alone are not just numbers on a spreadsheet. Every one of them represents a moment exactly like the one you just watched.

**[14:16] Speaker A:** A person whose judgment gave out on a crowded street in front of officers who now have to decide in real time whether they are watching someone dangerous or someone in crisis. Multiply that scene by dozens of similar calls a night for 10 straight nights and you start to understand why Sturgis Police Department's active caseload nearly doubled this year. Officers working this rally are not just managing traffic and issuing warnings. They are making split-second judgment calls about strangers over and over night after night. With almost no time to process one incident before the next one starts. A small department built to police 7,000 residents spends 10 days doing the work of a department several times its size. And every one of those decisions gets made in front of a phone camera with no room for a mistake. Then comes the part of the story that the official tally leaves out entirely.

**[15:09] Speaker A:** The three fatalities credited to the 2026 rally only include crashes that happened during the official window, August the 7th through August the 16th. They do not include what happened in the days surrounding the rally's opening when riders were already flooding into the Black Hills ahead of the official start. In that same stretch, an Illinois couple was killed near Hill City. A woman from Sioux Falls died in a crash involving two motorcycles on Route 14A south of Sturgis. Additional deaths were reported in the broader Black Hills region in the days just before the gates officially opened. None of these are part of the state's official rally tally. None of them show up in the headline number of three fatalities. They happened on the same roads during the same week involving the same crowd of riders and officially they simply do not count. Ask any rider who was already camped and settled in before the gates opened and they will tell you the rally does not begin on a calendar date.

**[16:07] Speaker A:** It begins the moment the first wave of bikes crosses into the Black Hills days before any official ceremony. And the roads do not care whether the paperwork has caught up yet. While Highway Patrol was finalizing crash statistics on the open road, Meade County deputies were still chasing a mystery that had started before the rally even opened its gates. One that did not involve a motorcycle at all. Before a single motorcycle officially rolled into Sturgis this year, deputies were already standing over something nobody could explain. A car submerged in raw sewage driven there by someone who has still never been found. On Thursday morning in the earliest days of rally week before the official gates had even opened, Meade County deputies were called out to a wastewater pond. Sitting inside it, fully submerged, was a 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine. The path it had taken to get there was almost impossible to picture calmly.

**[17:06] Speaker A:** Whoever was behind the wheel had driven straight through a campground, crashed through several fences, cut across an open pasture, and ended the journey nose down in a sewage lagoon. When deputies searched the vehicle, it was empty. No driver, no passengers. Deputies said, in their own words, that there were no bodies in the trunk. Plains Towing was brought in to pull the limousine out, and it reportedly smelled exactly the way you would expect a car to smell after spending time submerged in a wastewater pond. Meade County Sheriff's Office publicly asked for help identifying the owner. Anyone missing a 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine was asked to come forward. Nobody has. As the rally wound down, as the crowds packed up and rolled out of town, the owner of that limousine was still a ghost. No name, no explanation, no charges filed, just a ruined car, a public appeal that went nowhere, and a story that the department eventually turned into a lighthearted reminder to slow down during the rally, because sometimes the only way

**[18:11] Speaker A:** to process something this strange is to laugh at it in public and keep investigating in private to understand how something like that limousine could disappear into a sewage lagoon without a single witness coming forward.

**[18:23] Speaker A:** You have to understand what Sturgis actually is for the other 355 days of the year. It is a town of roughly 7,000 permanent residents. For 10 days every August, that number multiplies by a factor most cities never experience even once.

**[18:39] Speaker B:** Yeah, what a contrast, right? 7,000 people live here most of the year, 10 days of the year, 700,000 people live here. So, pretty wild. Guys, what are your names?

**[18:50] Speaker A:** Rick.

**[18:51] Speaker B:** And Shawn.

**[18:52] Speaker A:** Nice to meet you guys. Well, thanks a lot, and you guys enjoy your night. Hopefully the craziness is done for now.

**[18:59] Speaker B:** That population is never just one crowd. It is retirees on touring bikes, weekend riders from three states over, and outlaw motorcycle clubs who have been making this exact trip for decades, all packed into the same square mile of Main Street.

**[19:18] Speaker A:** And here comes the Hells Angels, ladies and gentlemen. They are here. They have arrived. The Hells Angels are here in Sturgis. Wow.

**[19:30] Speaker B:** This year, that surge was actually smaller than usual. Vehicle counts at nine entry points into Sturgis came in roughly 9% below the five-year average through the first week at 360,116 vehicles. Compare that to last year's anniversary surge of 537,459 vehicles, and you can see just how much lighter this year's crowd really was. And still, somewhere in that crowd, hundreds of thousands of people needed a place to sleep every single night. Roughly half of them camp. The 600-acre Buffalo Chip grounds handle a large share of that. Dense rows of tents and RVs packed around a stage that runs concerts late into the night. Smaller private campgrounds fill in the rest, along with dispersed camping scattered through the Black Hills National Forest. Everyone else pays for it. Hotel and rental prices in Sturgis, Deadwood, Spearfish, and Rapid City routinely run two to four times their normal rate during rally week.

**[20:34] Speaker B:** A temporary city of that size does not just need beds. It needs an entire infrastructure built and torn down in the span of 10 days. Every one of those hundreds of thousands of people eats, drinks, and generates waste, and the city has to be ready for all of it.

**[20:52] Speaker A:** Wild moments caught on camera at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Stay with us till the end. We've got a lot to see.

**[20:59] Speaker B:** Here we go, guys. World record Harley jump attempt.

**[21:12] Speaker A:** Nice. Did he land it? Did he land it? He landed it. Congratu- Here it is. Great job. Are you okay? Hold on. Damn.

**[21:31] Speaker A:** You need a tow or something? You need help?

**[21:40] Speaker A:** But, you have

**[21:40] Speaker B:** Sturgis prepares for up to 400 tons of extra garbage during Rally Week. Hundreds of 90- and 300-gallon totes are staged along the streets and vendor areas starting the Monday before the rally even begins. Collection crews run early morning routes, some starting around 2:00 in the morning, working alongside street cleaning crews, so that by the time riders wake up, downtown looks deceptively spotless. This year marked the beginning of a multi-year shift toward a third-party hauler to manage that surge load, with everything ultimately routed to landfills in Rapid City and Belle Fourche. The sewage side of the operation is even more delicate.

**[22:19] Speaker A:** Just like that,

**[22:21] Speaker B:** the road calls you home. The miles you came for, the moments you found,

**[22:31] Speaker A:** they don't stay here. You take them with you.

**[22:37] Speaker B:** You brought something powerful with you. The rumble of freedom, the spirit of the open road. A celebration of 250 years in the making. Thank you.

**[22:50] Speaker A:** Thank you.

**[22:51] Speaker B:** Thank you for stopping in, for spending time with us, for letting us be a small part of your ride. Because this isn't just a place you visit. It's something you carry forward. To the ones who come every year and the ones who just experienced it for the first time. This is never goodbye.

**[23:20] Speaker A:** It's just until next time.

**[23:24] Speaker B:** Sturgis runs a modern membrane bioreactor water treatment facility, upgraded in recent years from older stabilization ponds. But even that system is only built for the town's normal population. The overflow gets managed through storage lagoons, the exact kind of infrastructure that Limousine ended up buried in with excess waste water treated gradually over time. Strict limits protect Bear Butte Creek, a cold water fishery that cannot tolerate careless discharge. Portable toilets carry most of the real burden. City contracts require a minimum of 135 standard units and 15 handicap accessible units, serviced at least twice a day throughout the rally with campgrounds deploying hundreds more on top of that. Private properties hosting larger temporary crowds are required to bring in their own self-contained units. Ordinances strictly prohibit dumping gray water into storm drains and RVs are required to use designated dump stations. No major sewage failures were reported this year, but that is not an accident.

**[24:28] Speaker B:** It is the result of a small town quietly running an enormous temporary sanitation system for 10 straight days, mostly out of sight.

**[24:37] Speaker B:** So the version of Sturgis you see on camera never looks like the version working underneath it. All of that infrastructure exists to serve every rider who shows up. And in 2026, fewer of them did. The lighter crowds were not an accident either. Riders and local reporting pointed to a clear set of reasons. Hotel prices, food costs, and merchandise prices had climbed high enough that many attendees felt priced out of a rally they had been attending for years. Early week weather did not help with hail and rain pushing through and dampening the usual momentum. The later official start date compressed everyone's plans into a tighter window. The opening weekend still drew a strong crowd, but from there the numbers steadily softened. By the final Saturday, vendors described noticeably smaller crowd working through an unexpected heatwave. A strange bookend to a week that had opened with hail.

**[25:31] Speaker B:** Full and final traffic totals for the broader Black Hills region are not expected until the week of August the 24th, but every early signal points in the same direction. People left Sturgis earlier this year than they have in a long time, and money was the reason most of them gave. By the Monday after the rally closed, the transformation was already well underway. The temporary traffic signals that had guided hundreds of thousands of vehicles through town were still running out their final hours. Cleanup crews and the new third-party hauler were working through the last of that 400-ton waste surge. Portable toilet companies were pulling their units out one by one. No new headlines were breaking. No new drama was unfolding. Just the slow, methodical unwinding of a city built to disappear as completely as it appeared. By the following weekend, the same streets that had carried hundreds of thousands of vehicles would look almost exactly like they do the other 355 days of the year.

**[26:28] Speaker B:** Quiet, small, and easy to drive straight through without noticing. Somewhere in a Meade County evidence lot sits a ruined Cadillac limousine with no name attached to it. Somewhere in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in Durham, Connecticut, and in Hollandale, Minnesota, three families are learning to live with an empty garage. And somewhere in a filing cabinet that nobody will ever fully open, the real combined total of everything that happened across those 10 days sits scattered across three different agencies, never quite added up into one honest number. Sturgis will be back to 7,000 people by the time you finish watching this. Whatever else happened out there, most of it left with the crowd. Tell us in the comments if you think the owner of that limousine will ever come forward, and tell us which of these three men's stories stayed with you the longest.