KANSAS CITY, KAN. – A Kansas man was sentenced Tuesday to 92 months in federal prison for unlawful possession of a 9 mm handgun that was used in a robbery, according to U.S. Attorney Tom Beall.
Joshua J. Flaugher, 32, Kansas City, Kan., pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. In his plea, Flaugher admitted that investigators seized a loaded 9 mm handgun with a 30-round extended magazine from his residence. Flaugher was arrested at his aunt’s home in the 2400 block of Everett Avenue. Because he had a prior felony conviction in Wyandotte County District Court on a charge of aggravated battery, he was prohibited by federal law from possessing a firearm.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Missouri’s 2017-2018 deer-hunting season ended Jan. 15 with the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) reporting a preliminary total harvest of 283,940 deer.
According to an MDC press release, top counties for the overall season were Howell with 6,182 deer harvested, Franklin with 5,957, and Texas with 5,619. Of the 283,940 deer harvested, 135,891 were antlered bucks, 30,538 were button bucks, and 117,511 were does. Hunters harvested 263,834 deer during the 2016-2017 deer hunting season.
Deer hunting ended with the close of the archery season. Preliminary data from MDC showed that hunters checked 51,722 deer during the archery season. Top counties for the archery season were Jefferson with 1,169 deer harvested, St. Louis with 1,021, and Franklin with 1,000. Of the 51,722 deer harvested, 21,162 were antlered bucks, 5,319 were button bucks, and 25,241 were does. Hunters checked 47,552 deer during the 2016-2017 archery season.
Fall archery turkey hunting also ended Jan. 15. Preliminary data from MDC showed 2,426 turkeys harvested. Top counties for the archery turkey season were Phelps with 73 birds harvested, Texas with 63, and Laclede with 58. For the previous year, hunters harvested 2,304 turkeys.
The past season was the second in which MDC began allowing crossbows as a legal method during the deer and turkey archery season. Of the 51,722 deer harvested under archery methods, 19,691 were with crossbows. Of the 2,426 turkeys harvested under archery methods, 1,113 were with crossbows. For the first season that included crossbows (2016-2017), of the 47,552 deer harvested under archery methods, 14,336 were with crossbows, and of the 2,304 turkeys harvested under archery methods, 853 were with crossbows.
More deer and turkey harvest data for the current season can be found online.
MDC reported five firearms-related hunting incidents during the fall deer and turkey hunting seasons. All were non-fatal. Three involved self-inflicted wounds. Two involved one hunter shooting another.
ST. LOUIS (AP) – The Latest on Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens’ admission that he had an extramarital affair (all times local):
Several Republican lawmakers want Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens to resign after acknowledging he had an extramarital affair.
House members Kathie Conway, Steve Cookson, Marsha Haefner and Nate Walker all released statements Tuesday saying Greitens should consider stepping aside.
The Republican governor has given no indication of resigning and has remained out of the public eye since acknowledging late Wednesday that he had been “unfaithful” to his wife. His attorney has denied more lurid allegations related to the affair.
Walker was an early supporter of Greitens during his gubernatorial campaign. But Walker says the scandal doesn’t appear to be going away and Greitens should resign “so that that the state can move forward.”
Several Democratic lawmakers also have called for Greitens’ resignation.
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Royals pitcher Danny Duffy has pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in a Kansas City suburb and has been placed on a year’s probation.
Sean Reilly, a spokesman for the city of Overland Park, Kansas, said Tuesday that Duffy entered the plea last week and will pay $1,220 in fines and court fees. Duffy must report to a probation officer once a month and abstain from drugs and alcohol. He also will be subject to random breath, urine or blood screenings.
Royals spokesman Mike Swanson said the plea is a matter between Duffy, his representatives and the city.
Police stopped and cited Duffy in August after he returned to Kansas City during a road trip for an exam on the elbow of his pitching arm. The left-hander underwent surgery in October and is expected to be ready for spring training next month.
Duffy went 9-10 with a 3.81 ERA over 24 starts in the first season of a five-year, $65 million contract extension. He struck out 130 while issuing just 41 walks, and was expected to be the ace of a rebuilt starting rotation.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed into stricter rules for people on various welfare programs. He credits them for falling poverty in the state. Critics say the rules were too harsh and that people have risen with poverty because of a growing economy. FILE PHOTO / HEARTLAND HEALTH MONITOR
If nothing else, Sam Brownback has marked his time as governor of Kansas with one bold approach after the next. And few remade the status quo as much as his approach to welfare.
That sprung from his belief that even a well-meaning government that fails to prod the poor toward self-reliance ends up creating more dependency and stubborn poverty.
Like his record on such issues as game-shifting tax cuts, the results are arguably mixed.
Still, the wins Brownback notched early in his time in office transformed state government. Even now as his influence wanes — his popularity tanked, his likely future an early exit to a Trump administration job — policy fights now all relate to what he’s put in place.
Consider his signature tax cuts. They were rolled back last year by rebellious lawmakers who fumed that the Brownback approach saddled them with a budgetary mess.
Anti-abortion laws passed in the Brownback era have survived, but they remain a source of bitter criticism from the left and a notable part of his legacy.
Then there’s welfare. In seven years, Brownback shaped cash and food assistance around his vision of self-reliance. With work requirements for Medicaid recipientsnow also on the table, that vision may stretch even further.
“For years, we as a country have worked at and targeted poverty and have not made any progress on it since the War on Poverty was declared,” Brownback said in the speech announcing he’d accepted a nomination to be President Trump’s ambassador for religious freedom.
Kansas, the governor said, turned another way and found success.
In Brownback’s Kansas, people are cut off from welfare more quickly. With few exceptions, every able person had to work. Other rules tightened eligibility and shifted spending away from programs that for generations had been meant for the poorest of the poor.
As a result, the Department for Children and Families pays out traditional welfare to fewer people. It also spends less of its federal grant money.
While the Brownback administration points to a sizeable drop in child poverty as the payoff, that boast draws fire.
Policy analysts and groups that advocate for the poor contend that the drop in child poverty isn’t all because of Brownback’s policies. Rather, they argue those policies could hurt Kansas’ poor down the road. Getting folks to a steady paycheck isn’t as simple as providing job training and a hard deadline and, they say, making work a requirement for welfare ignores what families need.
Temporary assistance, a push to work
One of the Republican Brownback’s most powerful tools in reshaping welfare came out of the Clinton White House. A 1996 law turned Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a federal program that matched states’ spending on cash welfare, into a block grant system. That freed states to attack poverty as they saw fit.
With the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, all states had to do was put up a set amount of money to pull down tens of millions in federal grant money. In Kansas, state spending of about $65 million earns $100 million from Washington.
The money still came with strings attached. The federal and state dollars had to fit at least one of four purposes:
Helping needy families so kids can stay in their own homes
Reducing dependency through job preparation, work and marriage
Preventing and reducing pregnancies out of wedlock
Encouraging two-parent families
In return, states got more flexibility. Rulemakers in Topeka could test their own ideas about where that money went, to whom, and for how long.
The state took advantage of some of the new leeway over the years, but not until Brownback came to power did it aggressively change welfare rules.
The amount of its federal welfare money Kansas spends on work-related activities has dropped steadily since 2011, most steeply between 2011 and 2012, when it it fell from about $13 million to about $8 million CREDIT MADELINE FOX / SOURCE: CENTER FOR BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES/U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Since 2011, Kansas has cut the total number of months a person can get TANF in their lifetime from 60 months to 24. Able-bodied adults essentially earn their welfare checks through a job, or job training, 20 or more hours a week. New mothers were exempted from working, but only for the first three months of a child’s life.
“The goal was to get people employed, and really get people out of poverty — not off the (welfare) rolls,” said Dan Decker, assistant director of employment services at the Department for Children and Families. DCF oversees Kansas’s TANF programs.
Decker said the employment push worked. Some 44,000 people on the dole in 2011 now have jobs. What they’re gaining, he said, is “that value to yourself, that value to the community, through employment.”
Some of those still collect welfare, many don’t. But the overall number of families receiving TANF fell from about 15,000 to roughly 5,000.
Now many of those Kansas families don’t just have wage earners, they’re climbing out of poverty. Child poverty in Kansas fell from 19 percent in 2011 to 14 percent in 2016. Nationally, the rate fell from 23 percent to 19 percent in that period.
“Throwing people off the bus”
Brownback’s critics saw his approach to welfare reform as short-sighted.
Child welfare advocate Annie McKay said Brownback is also taking credit for gains that don’t reflect his policies so much as national trends.
“Poverty has been going down, unemployment has been going down, all over the country. It’s called recovery from the Great Recession,” said McKay, who leads the nonprofit Kansas Action for Children. “What’s happening in Kansas is not unique.”
She worries that the welfare changes passed under Brownback could set the state up for bigger problems down the line.
McKay’s organization advocates for policies that improve kids’ lives across many measures — poverty, academic achievement, health and safety in their families. She said that as kids are disconnected from the safety net provided by state welfare services, they could begin to struggle in school, or their families might fracture, landing children in crisis.
In fact, Researchers at the University of Kansas studying the state’s changes found a preliminary correlation between shrinking welfare help and a new wave of kids flooding the state’s already overwhelmed foster care system.
Rochelle Chronister, who headed Kansas’s state welfare agency in the 1990s, said there’s “absolutely” a connection between welfare reduction and more kids needing to be pulled from troubled families.
“There are things you can do to help improve things for families,” she said “I didn’t see any of those things happening (under Brownback).”
Chronister, who was a Republican lawmaker before taking over what was then the Department for Social and Rehabilitation Services, said the state should try to move welfare recipients toward employment. She wants limits on how long people can receive welfare. She thinks the five-year lifetime limit during her tenure was “about right.”
But by cutting eligibility to two years, she said the Brownback administration is “throwing people off the bus before they’re ready to take that next step.”
Disinvesting from welfare
While Brownback touts self-reliance and a work-first mentality, Kansas actually spends a smaller share of its state and federal welfare dollars on work programs than it did in 2011.
At the same time, it spends a much smaller percentage on cash assistance — those monthly payments that require 20 hours of work a week — than it did before the governor took office.
Kansas’ overall welfare spending is also down. A chunk of the money it gets from the federal government goes unspent, left in a reserve fund that the state might spend on welfare in the years to come.
Since 2011, Kansas has socked away $60 million of federal grant money, up from just $10 million when Brownback entered office.
McKay said she’s angry the state isn’t using more of that money.
“It is unconscionable to me that we are struggling as a state to meet the needs of children and families,” she said. “We are banking dollars that could be making an impact on the child welfare system.”
Meanwhile, the state shifted some welfare dollars from direct assistance to low- and moderate-income tax credits.
The Earned Income Tax Credit puts money back in the pockets of working families. Because it encourages people to work, it meets the federal standard to count as welfare spending — and it’s popular among both Republicans and Democrats.
But what most analysts consider the core of welfare — a safety net of job training, cash and child care the poorest families need during their most troubled times — doesn’t include the tax credit for the working poor.
The EITC was part of Kansas budget obligations before Brownback, and has been partially paid for using welfare money since 2001. But during Brownback’s tenure, the state put an even greater percentage toward the EITC, using the bulk of its obligated state welfare money to cover the tax credit.
The reliance on EITC to comply with federal welfare rules reflects the state budget more broadly, said Liz Schott of the left-leaning national Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Still, the Brownback team champions Kansas as an example of how to wean people off welfare — primarily by insisting that they work.
“We believe the policies are right around TANF,” said Gina Meier-Hummel, the new head of Kansas’s welfare agency. She was tapped to lead DCF by Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, suggesting that Brownback’s policies might continue after his administration.
“We’ve seen great success around families getting to work.”
Madeline Fox is a reporter for the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR. You can reach her on Twitter @maddycfox.
GRETNA, La. (AP) — The trial in a road-rage shooting that took the life of former NFL football player Joe McKnight began Tuesday in a New Orleans suburb, where a judge and attorneys were questioning dozens of potential jurors.
Ronald Gasser, 56, is charged with second-degree murder in the Dec. 1, 2016, shooting of the player who began his career as a local high school football star. Initially charged with manslaughter, Gasser was indicted on the more serious charge last February. He has pleaded not guilty.
Gasser, who remains jailed with bond set at $750,000, was dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit as he entered the courtroom, accompanied by sheriff’s deputies.
McKnight, 28, was a running back, considered a top recruit when he came out of John Curtis Christian School. He played college ball at Southern California before three seasons with the New York Jets and one with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Witnesses at the scene of the road rage shooting- photo courtesy WWL
Jury selection was set to begin in the courtroom of state District Judge Ellen Kovach. Gasser’s attorneys have cast McKnight as the aggressor and are expected to argue Gasser fired in self-defense.
If convicted as charged, Gasser would face a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
Police said the confrontation took place as the men traveled across a Mississippi River bridge in New Orleans and on roads in neighboring Jefferson Parish.
Authorities said the shooting happened after both cars had stopped and McKnight approached Gasser’s vehicle. Gasser shot McKnight three times.
Defense attorneys said last year that they believe McKnight tried to enter Gasser’s car through the passenger window. They noted that Gasser stayed on the scene after the shooting and said he cooperated with police.
The case bore striking similarities to an earlier 2016 shooting death involving another former NFL player. Will Smith, who retired after starring on New Orleans Saints teams that inspired the city after Hurricane Katrina with winning seasons and a 2010 Super Bowl victory, was shot to death during a confrontation following a traffic crash. A 29-year-old New Orleans man, Cardell Hayes, was sentenced to 25 years in prison after a jury convicted him of manslaughter.
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GRETNA, La. (AP) — The trial in a road-rage shooting that left former NFL football player Joe McKnight dead was set to begin with jury selection Tuesday in a New Orleans suburb.
Ronald Gasser, 55, is charged with second-degree murder in the Dec. 1, 2016, shooting of the local high school football star.
McKnight, 28, was a running back, considered a top recruit when he came out of John Curtis Christian School. He played college ball at Southern California before three seasons with the New York Jets and one with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Police said the confrontation took place as the men were traveling over a Mississippi River bridge in New Orleans and on roads in neighboring Jefferson Parish.
Jury selection was set to begin in the courtroom of state District Judge Ellen Kovach. Gasser’s attorneys have cast McKnight as the aggressor and are expected to argue Gasser shot in self-defense.
If convicted as charged, Gasser would face a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
Authorities said the shooting happened after both cars had stopped and McKnight approached Gasser’s vehicle. Gasser shot McKnight three times.
Defense attorneys said last year that they believe McKnight tried to enter Gasser’s car through the passenger window. They noted that Gasser stayed on the scene after the shooting and said he cooperated with police.
The case bore striking similarities to an earlier 2016 shooting death involving another former NFL player. Will Smith, who retired after starring on New Orleans Saints teams that inspired the city after Hurricane Katrina with winning seasons and a 2010 Super Bowl victory, was shot to death during a confrontation following a traffic crash. A 29-year-old New Orleans man, Cardell Hayes, was sentenced to 25 years in prison after a jury convicted him of manslaughter.
The Brown County Sheriff’s Office in Hiawatha, Kansas, has received several reports of a texting scam in the area.
According to Sheriff John Merchant, some residents are reporting they have received text messages stating their bank account has been compromised and a number is given to call. When the number is called, they are prompted to enter their debit card number.
Sheriff Merchant said most financial institutions will not text you that type of information and urges residents to never give out personal information over the phone or through text.
Sheriff Merchant adds there have been several variations on this scam, as residents are also receiving phone calls with the same information from a number they do not recognize with callers representing themselves as bank personnel concerned about debit card usage. Callers are then asked to verify their debit card account numbers.
Anyone who thinks they may have been a victim of a scam is advised to notify their bank immediately and contact local law enforcement.
Monday afternoon fire in Lawrence-photo courtesy KCTV
LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a fire has destroyed a Lawrence motel but that the occupants evacuated safely.
The Lawrence Journal-World reports that the fire started before noon Monday in the Americas Best Value Inn. The building, which has been a Super 8 motel in recent years, is located northwest of the intersection of Sixth and Iowa streets.
Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical Division Chief and Fire Marshal James King says the fire started in the lowest level. After one firefighter fell through a floor inside the building while battling the blaze, the decision was made to battle the fire defensively, pouring water on it from the outside.
The firefighter who fell was quickly rescued, evaluated at the scene and returned to his crew uninjured. The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately determined.
LINCOLN, Mo.-— A man has been arrested in a deadly shooting at a west-central Missouri mobile home park.
The Benton County Sheriff’s Office says 27-year-old Caleb L.D. Shephard, of Cole Camp, was shot Friday night just outside the town of Lincoln. The Sedalia Democrat reports that he was rushed in an ambulance to a helicopter landing site, where he died.
Deputies reported the arrest of 21-year-old William J. Heffernan for the shooting. Shephard was shot outside the suspect’s residence. Heffernan is being held on a $1-million bond on requested charges of 2nd-degree murder, armed criminal action and tampering with evidence, according to the sheriff’s department.
Benton County Sheriff Eric Knox said a motive for the shooting hasn’t been determined.
Shephard’s obituary described him as a U.S. Army veteran and a father to two sons.
HOWELL COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 7:30p.m. Monday in Howell County.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2003 Ford F250 driven by Dan C. Mcentire, 53, Hardy, AR., was southbound on U.S. 63 five miles west of Plains.
The driver lost control of the vehicle on the icy roadway. The truck traveled off the road, overturned and struck a tree.
A passenger Danny C. Mcentire, 34, Hardy, AR., was pronounced dead at the scene. Dan Mcentire was transported to Ozark Medical Center with minor injuries.
Both were properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the MSHP.
