MARYVILLE, Mo. (AP and Post) – A Maryville man is charged with crashing a vehicle into a bar and killing a Northwest Missouri State University student.

According to court documents, 21-year-old Alex Allen Catterson was charged Sunday with first-degree involuntary manslaughter in the death of 19-year-old Morgan McCoy.

As previously reported, around 12:40 a.m. Sunday, McCoy, a sophomore elementary education major from Liberty, was hit when Catterson’s pickup truck crashed into The Palms at 422 North Buchanan Street. The truck ended up partially inside the building. McCoy was transported to St. Francis Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

No attorney is listed for Catterson in online court records. Bond is set at $50,000.

Police said his blood alcohol level of 0.207 was more than twice the legal limit.

St. Joseph Police are urging people to use caution when driving Monday morning as there have been reports of black ice in the area.

According to Sgt. Brett Kelley with the police department, there have been several reports of cars sliding off the road including Mason Road, Stockyards Expressway and I-229. 

MARYVILLE, Mo. – A Northwest Missouri State University student died early Sunday as a result of injuries suffered after a vehicle crashed into a Maryville bar.

According to a news release from Northwest, Morgan McCoy, a sophomore elementary education major from Liberty, Missouri, died as a result of injuries she suffered when a vehicle crashed into The Palms at 422 N. Buchanan, around 12:40 a.m. McCoy, who was inside the building, was transported to St. Francis Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

The driver of the vehicle was taken into custody, and the incident is under investigation by the Maryville Public Safety and the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Maryville Fire and Rescue, the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department and the University Police Department assisted at the scene.

McCoy was a member of the Sigma Kappa sorority, and she was a student employee with the School of Education in Everett Brown Hall.

The St. Joseph Museums and Friends of the Rolling Hills Library are teaming up to offer a trip in March to explore the arts in the Ozarks.

The first stop will be Sandstone Gardens in Joplin for shopping and dining. The majority of the trip will be spent in Bentonville, Arkansas, where travelers will stay at the 21c Museum Hotel. Kathy Reno with the St. Joseph Museums said the hotel is one of only a few like it in the country.

“It’s an art museum of contemporary art with a hotel, with a chef,” Reno said. “It is beyond beautiful and the art constantly rotates.”

The trip also includes dining at The Preacher’s Son, seeing the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and touring a Frank Lloyd Wright home.

“Crystal Bridges Museum of Art was designed by the same man that designed the Center for Performing Arts in Kansas City,” Reno said. “He’s created a unique pavilion that surrounds a huge body of water and it’s in tune with its environment. What I fell in love with the first time was the nature trails. So even if… you don’t think you’re an art person, it’s not just about art, it’s charming if you are a nature person, if you’re an architecture person.”

The Arts in the Ozarks trip will leave at 8 a.m. on March 15th, from the St. Joseph Museums and will return to St. Joseph at 9 p.m. on March 16th.

The trip includes meals, transportation and accommodations. For more information and pricing, click here, call (816) 232-8471 ext. 13 or [email protected].

A proposal for temporary gates in the area of Felix Street Square was brought before the St. Joseph City Council.

St. Joseph Mayor Bill Falkner said the proposal is by a group of downtown business and property owners and citizens who are wanting the gates as a safety precaution.

Falkner said the four gates would be a way to close off the streets from traffic around Coleman Hawkins Park during events.

“I think in the long run, what we’re trying to do downtown and bring in the music festivals that they bring in, it’s getting larger and larger,” Falkner said. “So we’ve got to have a way to protect the people that are down there because it spills out into the streets and when you’re walking from the businesses or walking just around, sometimes you don’t pay attention to the streets when there’s so many people there.”

Falkner says funding for the gates would be through a hotel motel tax coming from the portion from the downtown motel.

According to City Manager Bruce Woody, the estimated cost of the project is around $200,000.

The first reading of the proposal took place at the city council meeting January 2nd. The vote to approve funding will take place at the next meeting.

The City of St. Joseph Health Department is conducting a community health assessment to help with planning programs and working toward a healthier community.

Health Educator Nancy King said the assessment will help get feedback on what community members feel are the overall health issues in the community, with an emphasis on priority health issues for infants, children, adolescents and women of childbearing age as part of the maternal child health contract.

“This will help us to develop programming and to develop what priority health issues we want to address over the next three years with regard to maternal child health,” King said.

The questions are broad and ask for opinions about community health issues and quality of life in the St. Joseph area. King said some of the questions ask for opinions on the most significant health problems in the community, safety issues for people in the community and whether the area is a good place to raise children and grow old. 

“We really encourage people to take the survey… it’s the new year and as we are looking at New Year’s resolutions and how we can make positive changes in our own lives, we really look for feedback on what people feel like what positive changes we can make in our community to make it a healthier and safer place to live,” King said. “We would like to have this community health assessment sort of be that starting point to help us identify what positive changes we need to make in our community to make it a better place.”

The survey is available online. The Health Department will also be posting notices on its Facebook page of times and locations Health Department staff will be out in the community with tablets and paper copies of the survey within the next week.

For more information, contact the Health Department at (816) 271-4636. Print copies of the survey are available at the St. Joseph Health Department at 904 South 10th Street.

ATCHISON, Kan. (AP) — Federal investigators say ordinary key rings that were missing from chemical storage tanks were a primary reason a chemical cloud spread over Atchison in 2016, sending more than 140 people to the hospital.

MGPI Processing used metal key rings to secure pipelines to chemical storage tanks at its Atchison plant. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board says in a report released Wednesday that in October 2016, an employee opened one line to take delivery of sulfuric acid. Two other lines were open because the rings were missing.

The Kansas City Star reports a delivery driver, expecting to find only one unlocked line, sent sulfuric acid into a tank containing sodium hypochlorite. The incompatible chemicals erupted into a cloud that spread over the Atchison area.