LIBERTY, Mo. (AP) — Authorities say a 30-year-old man who disappeared after going for a run in July died of natural causes.

The body of Chad Rogers was discovered inside a portable toilet near a Liberty construction site on July 26, four days after he left his home in the Kansas City suburb for an evening run.

Liberty police said Wednesday the Jackson County medical examiner’s office found no signs of foul play. The precise cause of his death was not released.

Rogers was an avid runner and a former youth minister at a Jefferson City church. Family members said he had been a stay-at-home dad since moving back to Liberty recently with his wife and 1-year-old son.

His disappearance had triggered a massive search by hundreds of friends and volunteers.

PITTSBURG, Kan. (AP) — A judge has ordered a southeast Kansas woman to spend 30 days in jail followed by three years’ probation for the death of her 4-month-old son.

Heather Buckalew, 25, of Arma, was sentenced Tuesday in Crawford County District Court.

Buckalew pleaded no contest in July to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Memphis Cash Harvey in August 2012.
 

Prosecutors believe the baby was smothered when Buckalew rolled over onto him while they were sleeping. Investigators said the mother was inebriated at the time.

Buckalew was initially charged with second-degree murder, but the judge reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) – A southwest Missouri man has made an unusual offer to the thief who stole his SUV: Return my dog, and I’ll give you the vehicle’s title.

Doug Clark, of Marshfield, was making a brief transaction at a Springfield business last week when another customer walked outside and drove off in his Nissan Pathfinder.

Clark had left his family’s beloved pug Dugout in a crate inside the SUV with the engine and the air conditioning running.

Clark’s family is offering a $2,000 reward and spreading the word on Facebook. And Clark says the offer to trade the vehicle’s title for Dugout is serious. The family just wants the pug back home.

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — The Army psychiatrist sentenced to death for the Fort Hood shooting rampage has been forcibly shaved.

Maj. Nidal Hasan began growing a beard in the years after the November 2009 shooting that left 13 dead and 30 wounded.

The beard prompted delays to his court-martial because it violated Army grooming regulations.

Hasan is at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., home to the military death row.

 

Lt. Col. S. Justin Platt, an Army spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday that Hasan had been shaved. Officials at Fort Leavenworth previously had said Hasan would be subject to Army regulations.

The dispute over the beard had led to the ouster of the original judge in his court-martial. The new judge had allowed Hasan to keep it at his trial last month.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) – The Missouri Supreme Court is considering whether laws restricting actions by sex offenders and felons can be applied to people who were convicted before the laws were enacted.

The court heard arguments Tuesday on five cases dealing with sex offenses and guns.

A 2009 law prohibits convicted sex offenders from being near public parks with playgrounds or swimming pools. Three people are challenging whether that applies to them because they were convicted of sex offenses before 2009.

Two others are challenging a law that prohibits felons from possessing guns. That restriction was expanded to all felonies in 2008. Both men were convicted before then.

Missouri prohibits retroactive and ex post facto laws. The attorney general’s office contends the ban on retrospective laws relates to civil statutes, not criminal ones.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas Senate committee has approved Gov. Sam Brownback’s nomination of his chief counsel for an open seat on the state Court of Appeals.

The Judiciary Committee’s voice vote sends the nomination of Caleb Stegall to the full Senate. The chamber is expected to debate and vote on the appointment Wednesday.

Republicans dominate the Senate, so the GOP governor’s nomination wasn’t likely to meet much opposition.

That didn’t quiet complaints from Democrats.

Stegall faced questions about comments in 2005 in an online magazine he edited that encouraged “forcible resistance” to court orders in order to save the life of a brain-damaged Florida woman.

Stegall said during a Judiciary Committee hearing that the comments in The New Pantagruel about the Terri Schiavo case were an endorsement of civil disobedience.

Sen. Laura Kelly, D-Topeka, said she had reservations about Stegall’s appointment.

“If you look at Stegall’s history and writings, I get the sense he is ideologically motivated,” Kelly said. “I’m not sure how he will put all that aside.”

Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley says Stegall isn’t qualified to serve on the state’s second-highest court if one or more district court judges also applied for the seat. Stegall has not been a judge. Brownback did not release the names of any other nominees for the post.

GOLDEN CITY, Mo. (AP) — Hundreds of people filled a southwest Missouri church to say goodbye to a 12-year-old girl who died after disappearing while she played at a park.

The Golden City High School gym was filled to capacity Wednesday to honor Adriaunna Horton, a week after her body was recovered in Dade County.

Thirty-four-year-old Bobby Bourne Jr., of Lockwood, is charged with first-degree murder, forcible rape, statutory rape and child kidnapping.

Brother David Powell, pastor of Golden City First Christian Church, told the mourners it was hard to understand evil but they should remember what a kind, friendly girl Adriaunna had been.

At the end of the service, her casket was carried to the Golden City IOOF Cemetery on a horse-drawn wagon because Audrianna loved horses.

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — A military jury has sentenced Maj. Nidal Hasan to death for killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.

Hasan has said the attack on unarmed soldiers was motivated by a desire to protect Muslim insurgents fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hasan could become the first American soldier executed in more than half a century. But because the military justice system requires a lengthy appeals process, years or even decades could pass before he is put to death.

The Army psychiatrist will “never be a martyr” and deserves to be executed despite his attempt to tie his attack on unarmed soldiers to religion, a prosecutor told jurors on Wednesday.

History was full of instances of death in the name of religion, but it would be “wrong and unsupportive” to tie Maj. Nidal Hasan’s actions to a wider cause, Col. Mike Mulligan told jurors in his final plea for a rare military death sentence.

“He will not now and he will never be a martyr. He is a criminal. He is a cold blooded murderer,” the lead prosecutor said. “This is not his gift to God. This is his debt to society. This is the cost of his murderous rampage.”

Hasan, an American-born Muslim, has tried through court documents and leaks to the media to justify the November 2009 shooting rampage as necessary to protect Islamic and Taliban leaders from U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hasan was never allowed to make those arguments to jurors, who convicted him last week for the attack that also wounded 30 people at the Texas military base. Still, Mulligan decided to answer those claims during the trial’s penalty phase.

“It was a conscious decision to commit murder to serve his own needs, his own wants,” Mulligan said in his closing argument. “His attack by him was all about him. This is about his soul, for his soul he stole life from 13 others.”

A few minutes after Mulligan finished, Hasan said he would give no closing argument — passing on his final chance to address jurors before they began deliberating his fate.

Hasan’s choice marked a continuation of an absent defense strategy that he has used since his trial began three weeks ago.

The Army psychiatrist has been representing himself during his trial. But his behavior has only stoked suspicion that his ultimate goal was martyrdom, in the form of a death sentence that would allow him to fulfill what prosecutors have described as a “jihad duty” under his Islamic faith.

Hasan has done nothing to dissuade jurors from giving him a death sentence. Even when his standby lawyers pleaded in vain to argue on his behalf, he described them as “overzealous.”

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Students in Lawrence will no longer be able to hang out on couches on their front porches.

The City Commission passed a citywide ban on upholstered furniture on porches, decks and patios. The city says landlords, not tenants, will be fined for violations.

Fines start at $100 per day. The city will conduct an educational campaign for several months before the ban is enforced.

The fire department says there had been only 10 fires involving upholstered outdoor furniture since 2007. But Fire Chief Mark Bradford said the furniture burns easily and makes outdoor furniture dangerous, particularly with the lack of smoke alarms on porches.