By Chad Ingram

The driver in a hit-and-run incident that occurred in Minden early Sunday morning has turned himself in to police.

On Sept. 13 the Haliburton Highlands OPP reported a man had been critically injured after being struck by a vehicle at approximately 2:40 a.m. near the intersection of Bobcaygeon and Deep Bay Roads.

He was found lying unconscious.

The injured man was taken to Minden hospital and then transported by air ambulance to hospital in Toronto where he remained at press time. Police said his injuries were life-threatening.

On Monday the OPP announced that a 28-year-old Minden man had turned himself in the day prior several hours after the incident.

He is being charged with failing to stop at the scene of an accident causing bodily harm a criminal charge and will appear in court in Minden on Nov. 4.

Haliburton Highlands OPP communications officer Dianna Dauphinee told the paper the man who was struck was also a 28-year-old man living locally.

She would not comment on the exact nature of his injuries or the facility to which he’d been taken.

“The victim sustained life-threatening injuries” Dauphinee wrote in an email. “Privacy laws protect medical records and we cannot provide a person’s medical condition and we don’t specifically identify hospitals. There are number of Toronto-area hospitals with trauma centres.”

Dauphinee said the investigation is ongoing.

Barrie resident Cassandra McLaughlin and her boyfriend were the ones who came across the victim as he lay on Bobcaygeon Road in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The pair were on their way back from a vacation in New Brunswick and had stopped in Minden looking for a gas station.

They turned down Bobcaygeon Road because it looked like a main artery that might be home to some pumps.

What they found instead was alarming.

“I saw him lying on the side of the road I told my boyfriend to turn around and go back” McLaughlin told the Times . “When we went back there was debris everywhere and it looked like he was dragged to the curb.”

McLaughlin described the man’s injuries as surreal having never seen anything like it outside a television screen before.

“It was the first time I’d seen muscle or tissue on someone other than myself exposed” McLaughlin said. “Like he looked like a Halloween decoration something from a movie. I didn’t initially know what was going on. I just did what I needed to do. I put my emotions aside and called 9-1-1. I covered him with a warm blanket and tried to get him to wake up which worked a little bit. He wasn’t fully conscious but I held his hand until the paramedics came and took him.”

McLaughlin was appalled that anyone would leave another person in that condition

“You just don’t do that to another human being they’re not an animal and that’s what bugged me the most about this was that someone left him there.”