An armed robbery early Tuesday morning in Andrew County could have ties to recent St. Joseph robberies.

Andrew County Sheriff Bryan Atkins said Tuesday around 12:41 a.m. an armed robbery took place at the Jessie’s Last Stop Convenience Store, located at 6101 North Belt Highway and County Line Road in Country Club Village.

Atkins said the store clerk notified officials of the robbery. The suspects were described as one white man and two black men wearing bandanas and ski masks. The only clothing description provided was that one of the suspects had on a blue hoodie.

“The suspects entered the store, displayed a weapon and demanded money from the register. During the robbery, one of the suspect fired a round from his gun,” Atkins said. “Suspects took an undetermined amount of cash, a few cartons of cigarettes, and some potato chips.”

No injuries were reported. The suspects fled the store on foot into the dark.

“Investigators are continuing to work on the case,” Atkins said. “It is believe that the suspects could be the same individuals responsible for the robberies that have occurred in St Joseph the past few days.”

As we previously reported, the St. Joseph Police Department is investigating after two gas stations were held up at gunpoint over the past several days.

The Sheriff’s Office asks anyone with any information regarding this case to call the Sheriff’s Office at 816-324-4114 or the St Joseph Tips Hotline at (816) 238-TIPS.

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. – The following is a listing of general highway maintenance and construction work in the Northwest Missouri region planned for the week of Dec. 26– Jan.1 from the Missouri Department of Transportation. In addition to the work listed below, there may be pothole patching, bridge maintenance, striping, brush cutting, guardrail repairs and other road work conducted throughout the region. Many of these will be moving operations and could include lane closures with delays. With the possibility of winter weather, scheduled maintenance and construction projects may be postponed.

MoDOT will halt temporary lane closures throughout the state to accommodate an increase in traffic due to the New Year holiday. Most temporary lane closures will stop at noon on Friday, Dec. 30, and resume again Tuesday morning, Jan. 3. Some long-term closures and head-to-head traffic will remain in place.

MoDOT reminds the public to stay alert, watch for road work, buckle up, slow down, and drive with extreme caution through work zones and in changing weather conditions.

Buchanan County

Interstate 29 and U.S. Route 36 – Crossover maintenance, Dec. 27 – 30

Route 116 – From Route M to Route E for sealing, Dec. 27 – 30

Clinton County

Route 33 – At Isley Road for drainage work, Dec. 27 – 30

Route 116 – From U.S. Route 169 to the Buchanan County line for sealing, Dec. 27 – 30

Route 33 – From Clinton Street to Short Street in Lathrop for drainage work, Dec. 27 – 30

Daviess County

Route 13 – From Route 6 to Route HH for sealing, Dec. 27 – 30

DeKalb County

Route J – From Route 6 to Patton Road for drainage work, Dec. 27 – 30

Route N – CLOSED from Route 6 to U.S. Route 36 for several culvert replacements, Dec. 27 – 30, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. The entire route will not be closed every day, but will be closed in short segments along the route as crews replace culverts. They will begin near Route 6 and progress south through the week towards U.S. Route 36.

Gentry County

Route Z – Sealing, Dec. 28 – 30

Grundy County

U.S. Route 65 and Route 6 – Pothole patching, Dec. 27 – 30

Harrison County

I-35 – At the Route N overpass for drainage work, Dec. 27

I-35 – At the U.S. Route 136 overpass for drainage work, Dec. 28

U.S. Route 69 – From Miller Street to Allen Street in Bethany for drainage work, Dec. 29

Holt County

Route 111 – From Route 118 to U.S. Route 59 for pothole patching, Dec. 27 – 30

U.S. Route 59 – From the city limits of Skidmore to I-29 (Oregon exit) for pothole patching, Dec. 27 – 30

Linn County

Route 139 – Brush cutting, Dec. 27 – 30

U.S. Route 36 – From Route 11 to Route TT for sealing, Dec. 27 – 29

Mercer County

Route P – CLOSED at the Brushy Creek Bridge for a bridge replacement. The road will be closed until February 2017.

Nodaway County

U.S. Route 136 – From the One Hundred and Two River Bridge to Route 46 for shoulder work, Dec. 27 – 30

U.S. Route 136 – From Route J to the Gentry County line for sealing, Dec. 27 – 30

Route AE – Pothole patching, Dec. 28 – 30

Putnam County

U.S. Route 136 and Route 5 – Shoulder work, Dec. 27 – 30

In less than a week Easterseals Midwest will officially take over disability services formally provided by Progressive Community Services and expanding job opportunities in St. Joseph.

As we previously report, January 1, Easterseals will transition Progressive’s Community Living services to Easterseals Midwest.

“We’re taking over the services that are currently provided by Progressive.  They’ve asked us to come in and provide the community living support that they’ve been doing for years,” said Jeanne Marshall, Chief Program Officer with Easterseals. “The federal government who funds these types of services has put out a rule that says you can no longer provide targeted case management which is where you help oversee the person’s services and help them access what they need and you help them access funding for their services, you can’t do that as well as be the service provider.”

Marshall said in addition to taking on the staff members who are currently working in positions with Progressive they are also looking to fill additional positions.

“We offered to hire everybody who was working for progressive in this capacity and we’ve been working with them over the past few months in this transition,” Marshall said.

Around 30 full and part-time positions are being added.  CLICK HERE to apply.

“We would like to hire people who have experience working with people with developmental disabilities,” Marshall said. “But we also provide the training that’s necessary for them to be able to complete their job.”

Easterseals will open a satellite office in St. Joseph.

“We’re not taking over Progressive’s building.  They are probably going to be expanding and doing some other services once January comes,” Marshall said.

 

 

Christmas lights will turn-off for the season at Holiday Park after New Year’s Day.

“Christmas is never over,” said Jeff Atkins, City of St. Joseph Assistant Parks Dir. “We’ll start tearing the displays down on January 3.  Our staff is off on January 2 because of the New Year’s holiday.”

Atkins said it takes a couple of weeks to get all of the lights put away.

“We’ve always got plans going for things we want to do in the future.  So we’re already discussing next year of course,” Atkins said. “I’ve got two or three of my guys that if they could work on Christmas lighting year round that’s all they’d want to do.”

Atkins said the number of people who came through the park this year has been based on the number of Cherry Mash that have been handed out.

“Our numbers were really doing well this year until we lost three days due to the ice storm. But based on the amount of candy we were giving away I actually had to call and order more,” Atkins said. “I’m thinking we would easily have reached the 85,000 visitor number.”

Atkins said next year, a demographic study will be held at Holiday Park.

“We will actually keep track of each vehicle as it comes through as far as the zip-code of the driver and how many people are in the car.  That way we are able to determine how many people are coming each night, how far they’re willing to travel to come,” he said.

New features at the park this year included the waterfall lit-up in the lagoon, some new features to the stage area, and new LED lighting.

“The new LED lighting is making such a difference. It’s just so much brighter and crisp and it just really makes the displays jump out at you,” Atkins said. “It’s really a whole new look at the park.”

Other than converting the park to LED lighting Atkins said funding for the displays is provided by free-will donations from patrons who visit every year.

A special report released earlier this week observing areas, including the City of St. Joseph with higher cases of lead poisoning than Flint, Michigan took reporters about two months to complete.

Michael Pell is a Data Journalist with Reuters.  Pell said he began investigating elevated lead levels in children in September with his colleague Joshua Schneyer after covering a story in East Chicago, Indiana.

“The Mayor had to evacuate a housing complex over the summer because of a concern about lead exposure,” Pell said. “If you looked at just the census tract that contained the housing complex on the former industrial site, the Superfund site the percentage of kids with elevated lead levels was much higher than the surrounding areas and the census tract was one of the highest percentages with kids with high lead levels in the state of Indiana.”

Pell said because of that they found that larger testing data sets on county and city levels were obscuring problems in specific neighborhoods. That’s when they decided to submit an open records request to each state for lead testing broken down to the census tract level or by zip-code.  In the end, he said their efforts resulted in data collected from 21 states.

“St. Joseph stood out to us,” Pell said. “There were three census tracts where at least one in five children tested had elevated blood lead levels and there were seven census tracts where 15-percent of the kids tested had elevated blood lead levels.”

In St. Joseph from 2010 to 2015 Pell said around 8,000 children were tested and of those, around 900 tested positive for elevated lead levels.

In November, Pell made the trip from his home in New York to St. Joseph.  That’s when Pell said they spoke to Dr. Cynthia Brownfield who not only works with children with lead problems as a pediatrician with Mosaic Life Care, but also lives in a neighborhood with high levels.

“We spoke with her about some of the tensions in the community between those who want to preserve the historic buildings and also community health,” Pell said. “When you have houses that have been painted god knows how many times, over a nearly 100-year period, with lead paint that puts a lot of lead not just on the walls but every time it chips off, it flakes off or it gets sanded off it puts it in the soil around the house, possibly in the carpet, on the floor, everywhere.”

The Reuters report found nearly 3,000 areas across the country with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint. Pell said they decided to compare the numbers to Flint based on the public response after children there were exposed to lead in their drinking water.

“People were outraged by Flint.  It captured the imagination of the country and even outside of the country,” Pell said. “Just last week congress approved $170-million in aid to Flint.  Money talks.  That’s how concerned people were. Even in a bipartisan area they could get that approved for the city of Flint.  Now on the other hand, the CDC’s total budget for assistance to the states for lead remediation is $17-million.  So congress approved in one swoop 10 times the amount that the CDC has for the entire rest of the United States.”

“The thought process was; if you were outraged by what happened in Flint that there are other neighborhoods where your outrage factor should be even higher,” Pell said.

St. Joseph was one of the most toxic places in Missouri for lead levels.  However, Viburnum was found to be the worst in the state.

“One of the critical factors there was that Viburnum was a mining town,” Pell said. “For decades there probably wasn’t the best procedures to make sure lead was not escaping the facility.”

Pell and Schneyer visited a total of four communities around the country.  To view the report in full CLICK HERE.

 

Winter weather hit a little earlier than many officials expected Friday in St. Joseph which caused many problems with transporting students home.

Shawn Woods, Operations Manager with Apple Bus said the last students in the St. Joseph School District made it home around 10:15 Friday evening.  He said no one was injured even though bus drivers got into several difficult situations with the slick roads.

“The out pour of compassion Friday evening was outstanding.  We had many stories of drivers who were stranded with students on their bus.  Neighbors brought bottles of water, hot chocolate, various snacks and cookies to the drivers and their students,” Woods said. “Given the conditions and the icy roadways the skill that our drivers across the board showed was exemplary.”

Dr. Solon Haynes, Dir. of Student Services for the St. Joseph School District said it takes about an hour to implement an early out.

“It would have been after 2 before we could even have gotten the buses to school and our first school lets out at 2:50 so about 2:30 the buses are already leaving the bus lot to get to school,” Haynes said. “We monitored the weather all morning and watching radar that didn’t even really show up on the radar.  There wasn’t a real high chance of precipitation with that freezing rain. By the time it hit it just seemed like it hit just really quickly and the intensity of it that put the ice glaze all over the roads.  The only thing we could have done differently is probably we would have had to let out early that morning, well it wasn’t doing anything early that morning.”

Woods said the weather moved in earlier than anticipated.

“The forecast showed the weather moving in at 5 o’clock when we would have been done on a normal day,” Woods said. “It caught us right at the time when we were going out on our afternoon routes. So it was really crunch time.  It was the perfect storm of situations and I think all-in-all our driver’s handled it like the professionals that they are.”

Haynes said around eight Apple buses were reviewed for damage after Friday, also three special education buses for the district were in crashes and were also damaged.

“They had about eight buses that were in accidents that they either needed to repair or check before they would safely be able to be on the road.  That means probably that they have some mirrors or lights that were damaged or windows that were broken out,” Haynes said. “We didn’t have any injuries and all the students made it home safely.”

Getting buses to the schools to pick up students was a challenge from the beginning.  Three out of around 63 buses didn’t even make it to pick up kids.

“Overall I’m proud of the way our drivers handled the situation,” Woods said. “I’d like to thank the school district.  The principals, the staff, at each of the 23 schools in St. Joe.  They did an outstanding job of looking out for the students. Many of them stayed late into the night as well.  We had one school had five teachers that road around with the bus route and they didn’t get back until after 10.  The street department for St. Joe, First Responders, Fire Department, Police Department all assisted us in different ways.”

“Our staff in our schools, especially our elementaries really went above and beyond.  They made sure the kids had food. while they were waiting for the buses or their parents they were either playing games or watching movies,” Haynes said. “They really went above and beyond to make sure our kids were safe and taken care of and got home.”

Woods is asking community members to thank a bus driver if they see them for their efforts in getting kids home safely.

Due to road conditions and the condition of buses the St. Joseph School District canceled classes for Monday and Tuesday.  Solon said Monday the district is reviewing the situation to see if there’s anything that could have been done better.

“We’re doing a debrief,” Haynes said. “With the bus company and everybody involved so we can go through and see what we can do better.  What can we learn to make any incident like we had on Friday maybe make it less of an impact on students and the families in the district.”

 

All classes for the St. Joseph School District have been cancelled for Monday, December 19 and Tuesday, December 20.

Bridget Blevins with the district said several factors led to the decision including the temperature, the condition of the streets, the condition of parking lots and sidewalks on school property and the status of the buses following Friday’s weather.

St. Joseph Streets Department and emergency personnel are on day two of responding to winter driving conditions that took many by surprise.

Keven Schneider Interim Superintendent with the Streets Department said the first truck went out Friday at 1:15 p.m.

“We got a report of some mist in Manhattan but they said it was a small band and they thought it might get here at 11 but 11 came and went and noon came and went around 12:30 it started misting so we started looking at it. But they just said it was misting they didn’t say it was doing anything,” Schneider said. “We started watching it and boy it wasn’t 15 minutes and we said boy we’ve got to run. So we cleared phase one and started in.”

Schneider said if crews would have tried pretreating the roads based on the forecast they had they wouldn’t have started until 4 p.m.

“Our forecast was really nothing until freezing drizzle at 6 and that was only a 30 percent chance,” Schneider said.

Sgt. Quentin Abbott with the St. Joseph Police Department said from about 1 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Saturday morning officers have responded to 75 crashes and 49 assist motorists.

“A lot of the calls we’re getting now are hit and run calls where maybe overnight some vehicles were struck and the people are just getting up and around and noticing it,” Abbot said. “It looks like we’re starting to get caught up.”

Mosaic Life Care told us by 9 p.m. Friday they had already seen around 50 people come into the Emergency Room for winter weather related incidents. Both Schneider and Abbott are urging St. Joseph residents to stay home if they don’t have to go out.

“I would only go out If I needed to and even then I’d be very cautious because most of the residentials have not gotten anything. If you’re close to an emergency route those aren’t too bad,” Schneider said. “We’re now on secondaries which go into the residentials but even those got covered over again last night.”

Schneider said crews are now concerned with overnight temperatures and snow in the forecast.

Abbott said if someone has to get out to use commonsense driving.

“It’s starting to snow and some snow moving into the forecast,” Abbot said shortly after 9:30 Saturday. “With the additional snow on the way and accumulation if people don’t need to get out I wouldn’t. It’s probably a lot safer to stay home.”

Abbot said Friday night there was a least one emergency vehicle that hit ice overnight and was damaged.

JEFFERSON CITY – The Missouri Department of Transportation warns motorists to avoid travel if possible in Missouri through Sunday due to incoming ice and snow and single digit temperatures. Travel on Missouri’s roads should be restricted to necessary trips only. If travel is necessary, great caution should be taken and travelers should plan ahead using MoDOT’s online traveler information map, http://traveler.modot.org/map/.

“Despite treating the roads Friday, lower than forecasted temperatures paired with wet conditions in advance of the temperature drop resulted in road conditions that greatly impeded traffic and made travel difficult through most of Missouri,” said MoDOT State Maintenance Engineer Becky Allmeroth. “MoDOT crews and law enforcement worked throughout the night repeatedly freeing cars and trucks stuck on slick, hilly locations.”

Overnight, temperatures increased to above freezing and vehicles were able to get moving again. However, mist and rain continued to make the treatment of the roadways with chemicals challenging again.

“Today, temperatures will plummet to arctic levels making travel very dangerous again. We expect flash freezing situations on Missouri highways starting early Saturday,” said Allmeroth. “Pavements will change from wet to ice in an instant, and our road treatment chemicals are not as affective in the extreme cold. Once temperatures drop below 20 degrees in your area today, motorists should strongly consider postponing travel.”

MoDOT’s highway digital message signs will inform motorists of closed sections of interstate. Motorists should heed those warnings and exit the highway before the noted closure.

To check road conditions including winter weather conditions and traffic speeds, please check MoDOT’s Traveler Information Map at http://traveler.modot.org/map/. The map is also available as a free app for Apple and Android devices. The map denotes locations where the road is closed with a red exclamation point.

If you have to travel, please use proper winter safety precautions and make sure you have a full tank of gas, extra blankets and gloves and provisions like water and snacks. Please wear your seat belt and don’t drive distracted. If you encounter car troubles or are involved in a crash, please remain in your vehicle.

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