OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas woman already charged with trying to kill her three children is now accused of seeking a hit man to kill her ex-husband.
Roever -Photo Johnson County
Therese Irene Roever, 37, Olathe, was charged Wednesday with a second attempted capital murder charge for plotting to have an unnamed person kill John Roever.
Roever was charged in February with attempted capital murder for an alleged attempt on her children’s lives. John Roever had residential custody of the children but they were visiting their mother when she and the children were found to have been drugged.
Court documents say doctors told investigators two of the children would have died if they had been found later.
Court documents containing details of the new allegations are not yet publicly available.
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — A civil rights group says staff at a privately run Kansas prison repeatedly have disparaged a Muslim woman for wearing a headscarf and ordered her to take it off before allowing her to leave her cell.
The Washington-based Muslim Advocates raised concerns about the treatment of 49-year-old Valeriece Ealom in a letter to CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based company that operates the prison in Leavenworth.
The letter, which was made public Wednesday, also was sent to the U.S. Marshals Service, which contracts with CoreCivic to house federal prisoners.
Ealom has been held at the facility since last November after federal prosecutors moved to revoke her parole in a drug case. She has sued over her treatment.
CoreCivic did not immediately respond to questions from The Star.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s claim that a Wichita high school has a dozen assistant principals is not true but his campaign says he stands by his contention that Kansas schools have too many administrators.
Kobach during the debate at the Kansas State Fair-photo courtesy Kobach for Governor
Kobach made the statement Saturday during a debate between GOP governor’s candidates at the Kansas State Fair.
Kobach spokeswoman Danedri Herbert said a state legislator told Kobach about the Wichita school.
After Wichita school officials objected, Herbert said the campaign checked and found that East High School and North High School in Wichita combined have a dozen principals and vice principals, which she says is “clearly excessive.”
Mark Tallman, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said he isn’t aware of any school in the state with 12 assistant principals.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri’s U.S. Senate candidates Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Josh Hawley have released their 2017 tax returns.
The candidates released their taxes Wednesday.
McCaskill filed separately from her husband, wealthy businessman Joseph Shepard. McCaskill’s return shows she brought in a roughly $86,000 pension on top of her $174,000 salary. She also claimed about $89,000 in deductions, although she did not release an itemized list with further details.
Hawley and his wife filed a joint return and together brought in an adjusted gross income of about $296,000. They claimed about $39,000 in itemized deductions.
McCaskill is a top target for Republicans seeking to expand the party’s slim 51-49 edge in the U.S. Senate. She is among 10 Senate Democrats up for re-election this year in states that President Donald Trump won.
WASHINGTON —The Kansas Association of Wheat Growers presented Senator Bob Dole with a Lifetime Friend of Wheat Award Wednesday
Dole was recognized for his steadfast dedication to Kansas farmers. “Thank you for your lifetime of public service, Senator Dole.
Kansas First District Congressman Roger Marshall also participated in the presentation.
Ken and Kyler (KAWG Directors) presented @SenatorDole with a Lifetime Friend of Wheat Award today for his steadfast dedication to Kansas farmers. Thank you for your lifetime of public service, Senator Dole! And another big thanks to @RogerMarshallMD for meeting with us, too! pic.twitter.com/YIZVZGuCYS
Dole, who celebrated his 95th birthday in July served Kansas in Congress for 35 years. He left the Senate in 1996 for his campaign against President Bill Clinton. Congress recently awarded him a Congressional Gold Medal.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri House has voted to override Gov. Mike Parson’s vetoes of about $785,000 of budgeted expenditures for services benefiting hospitals, youth and the deaf.
The votes Wednesday marked the first step in the process of overriding vetoes. The Senate also would need to approve the veto overrides by a two-thirds vote for them to be accomplished.
Parson made 21 line-item vetoes totaling more than $12 million when he enacted the state’s $28.6 billion budget for the fiscal year that started July 1. The House voted to override four of those, including funding for a hospital certification program and public defenders for juveniles.
It’s somewhat unusual for a Republican-led legislature to override vetoes of a Republican governor. But House budget leaders said the programs at issue are important.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri Department of Revenue says the state has been given more time to comply with identification requirements under the Real ID Act.
The department announced Tuesday that the federal government has granted Missouri an extension through Jan. 21, 2019. The current extension ends Oct. 10.
During the extension, federal agencies will accept Missouri-issued driver’s licenses and ID for official business, including domestic air travel.
A Missouri law that took effect in August 2017 gives residents the option to get driver’s licenses or other ID cards that comply with stricter identification regulations under the federal law.
The state expects to be compliant with the REAL ID Act’s requirements by March 2019
KANSAS CITY (AP) — A 10-year-old Missouri boy is recovering after he was attacked by insects and tumbled from a tree, landing on a meat skewer that penetrated his skull from his face to the back of his head.
But miraculously, that’s where Xavier Cunningham’s bad luck ended. The skewer had completely missed Xavier’s eye, brain, spinal cord and major blood vessels, The Kansas City Star reports.
Xavier’s harrowing experience began Saturday afternoon when yellow jackets attacked him in a tree house at his home in Harrisonville, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) south of Kansas City. He fell to the ground and his mother, Gabrielle Miller, ran down the stairs when she heard screaming. His skull was pierced from front-to-back with half a foot of skewer still sticking out of his face.
Miller tried to reassure her son, who told her “I’m dying, Mom” as they rushed to the hospital. He eventually was transferred to the University of Kansas Hospital, where endovascular neurosurgery director Koji Ebersole evaluated the wound.
“You couldn’t draw it up any better,” Ebersole said. “It was one in a million for it to pass 5 or 6 inches through the front of the face to the back and not have hit these things.”
There was no active bleeding, allowing the hospital time to get personnel in place for a removal surgery on Sunday morning that was complicated by the fact that the skewer wasn’t round. Because it was square, with sharp edges, it would have to come out perfectly straight. Twisting it could cause additional severe injury.
“Miraculous” would be an appropriate word to describe what happened, Ebersole said.
Doctors think Xavier could recover completely.
“I have not seen anything passed to that depth in a situation that was survivable, let alone one where we think the recovery will be near complete if not complete,” he s
KANSAS CITY— (AP) — A 10-year-old boy is recovering after he tumbled from a tree house and was impaled through the skull by a meat skewer.
Xavier Cunningham, of Harrisonville, Missouri, landed on the skewer Saturday afternoon while trying to escape from a group of attacking yellow jacket insects. His mother, Gabrielle Miller, says she went running when she heard screaming. The skewer had pierced her son’s face, penetrating his skull all the way to the back of his head.
The University of Kansas Health System’s endovascular neurosurgery director, Koji Ebersole, says, “You couldn’t draw it up any better.” The skewer spared Xavier’s eye, brain and spinal cord and missed major blood vessels.
Doctors were able to remover the skewer Sunday and believe Xavier could recover completely.
Jefferson City, Mo. – Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley announced that a Buchanan County jury took less than one hour to find Franklin J. Stitt, Jr., 82, to be a sexually violent predator.
According to a news release from Hawley’s office, Stitt, a former resident of Amazonia, Missouri, and diagnosed pedophile, has a decades long history of sexually abusing boys and girls as young as four years old.
His behavior began over 40 years ago, when he was repeatedly detected exposing himself to children while working as a computer repairman in the military. In 1983, he was convicted in New Jersey for sexually abusing a young girl over several years, beginning when she was eight. In 1997, at the age of 62, he relocated to a home across the street from an elementary school in Amazonia and began molesting and raping multiple young children, aged four to ten years old.
When he was caught, additional victims came forward, including his own children who reported incest during the 1970s and 1980s and turned over letters in which Stitt justified incest as bringing his victims closer to God. Stitt voiced opinions that he was divinely commanded by God to seek out sex with children and was justified by the Bible to commit incest. Stitt refused sex offender treatment in Missouri’s Department of Corrections, showing no remorse and claiming it would be a sin.
Before Stitt’s possible release to the community in 2017, the Missouri Attorney General filed a petition to instead commit him to a secure mental health facility as a sexually violent predator. Stitt will remain in the facility and away from children until he is safe to be at large.
“There is no place for those who abuse Missouri’s children,” Hawley said. “Those who do so will be removed from society until they are fit to return.”
The case was tried by Assistant Attorney General Monty Platz and investigated by Missouri’s Sexually Violent Predator Unit.
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – A West Plains, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for receiving and distributing thousands of images of child pornography over the internet, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Steven Edward Moffis, 31, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool to 15 years and six months in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Moffis to a lifetime of supervised release following incarceration.
Moffis, who pleaded guilty on April 23, 2018, came to the attention of law enforcement during an investigation of individuals making child pornography files available to others on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing program.
According to court documents, Moffis admitted that he had been addicted to child pornography for seventeen years. Moffis admitted to law enforcement officers that he had an uncontrollable problem with child pornography. Law enforcement located images and videos of child pornography on Moffis’s cellular phone.
