GEARY COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities continue their investigation into the alleged contract murder of a pregnant Kansas woman and have a third suspect in custody.

On Tuesday, police reported the arrest of 37-year-old Jeremiah Joseph Grubb of Junction City on suspicion of Conspiracy to Commit Capital Murder of 31-year-old Jenna Schafer. She was found dead on Christmas Day, according to police.

Two other suspects in the death are already in custody.

Prosecutors alleged in a criminal complaint filed January 7, that Mashaun Jay Baker hired his co-defendant, Dion Jamel Green, to kill Schafer who was found dead in an apartment in Junction City.

Green was arrested later that day, while Baker was arrested on Jan. 2, according to police.

Green and Baker, both 33, are charged with capital murder because Schafer’s death was part of an alleged murder-for-hire plot. Green faces an additional capital murder charge because Schafer’s unborn child also died.

The shooting happened either on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, according to the criminal complaint.

Grubb was arrested Tuesday along with Julia M. Ridenhour, 20, Junction City after police conducted a search in the 600 Block of West 5th Street in Junction City on Drug and Drug Paraphernalia charges, according to a media release.
Grubb and RIdenhour are being held at the Geary County Detention Center without bond pending a first court appearance. Police have released no additional details on Grubb’s connection to the murder.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — A 26-year-old Missouri woman who intentionally drove her car into the Kansas River with her two children inside has been sentenced to life in prison.

Scharron Dingledine, of Columbia, Missouri, was sentenced Tuesday for first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder.

Prosecutors said she drove her car into the river near Lawrence in August . She and her 1-year-old son were rescued. The body of her 5-year-old daughter, Amiyah Bradley, was recovered the next day.

Dingledine told police she drove into the river in an attempt to kill herself and her children. She said she knew neither child could swim and would likely die.

She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder charge, and nearly 13 years for the attempted murder charge.

HARRISONVILLE, Mo. (AP) — Missouri inspectors have found that staff at hospital south of Kansas City failed to properly respond to an 83-year-old woman who showed distress after a routine colonoscopy and died the next day from internal bleeding.

Inspectors went to Cass Regional Medical Center in late November after receiving a complaint about the Aug. 3 death of Martha Wright, of Pleasant Hill.

The inspectors passed their findings to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which classified the situation as an “immediate jeopardy” that “placed all patients at the facility at risk.”

Cass Regional CEO Chris Lang said via email that the hospital is complying with the feds’ guidance.

Wright’s daughter, Dena Royal, says she has hired an attorney who is preparing to sue.

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas woman has been found guilty of injuring an infant boy so badly at her home day care that he was left blind and brain damaged.

Paige Hatfield, 27, Olathe, was found guilty Friday of aggravated battery in Johnson County District Court.

The jury also granted a motion to allow the judge to impose a sentence above what is called for in state sentencing guidelines.

Hatfield is scheduled to be sentenced March 28.

The boy, Kingston Gilbert, was four months old when he was injured at the unlicensed day care in January 2017.

Hatfield testified that she did not hurt the child.

On Monday, three fatal Kansas accidents and another where the driver was critically injured had one thing in common. Those who died and the man critically injured were not wearing seat belts.

Just before 1:30 a.m., a GMC Sierra driven by Joli S. Hutto, 21, Mound Valley, was westbound on U.S. 400 two miles east of Parsons. The GMC crossed the center line and struck a 2003 Dodge Ram driven by Charles J. Wass, 62, Parsons, head-on. Both drivers were not wearing seat belts and died, according to the KHP.

Just after 12:40p.m., an eastbound Lexus SUV driven by 72-year-old June Rockey of Topeka crossed U.S. 75 at 190^th Road from the entrance of a convenience store in Jackson County, according to the sheriff’s department.  A northbound Ford F 250 struck the Lexus.  Rockey was transported to a Topeka hospital where she died. She was not wearing a seat belt, according to the sheriff’s department.

At 2p.m. Monday, a 2008 Honda Civic driven by  Tuyen T. Nguyen, 50, Wichita, was northbound on U.S. 83 two miles south of Garden City. The vehicle crossed the centerline, struck a semi and a bridge rail. She was transported to St. Catherine’s Hospital and died. She was not wearing a seat belt, according to the KHP.

Just after 3:30p.m. John K. Mwithiga, 24, Lawrence, was westbound on Intestate 70 just west of Spring Creek Road when he lost control of a 1999 Acura after partially entering the snow covered median. The vehicle slid across the westbound lanes of I-70, entered the ditch, went up an embankment, crashed through a KDOT fence, rolled and the driver was ejected. He was not wearing a seat belt, according to the KHP.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Anti-abortion leaders are promising to pursue a change in the Kansas Constitution if the state’s highest court rules that the document protects abortion rights.

Several hundred abortion opponents rallied Tuesday inside the Statehouse. They marked the 46th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that legalized abortion across the nation.

But anti-abortion leaders also had another pending court case on their minds.

The Kansas Supreme Court heard arguments nearly two years ago from attorneys on whether the state constitution protects abortion rights.

The justices have not ruled. If they declare that the state constitution protects abortion rights, state courts might invalidate restrictions in Kansas that would be upheld by the federal courts.

Anti-abortion leaders said they would respond by pursuing a state constitutional amendment.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — Conservation officials say eight people were shot, three of them fatally, during the 2018 fall deer and turkey hunting seasons.

The  Missouri Department of Conservation says two of the fatal shootings happened at hunting camps and the third happened in the field. The victims were identified previously as 52-year-old Randy Reising, of Arnold, 70-year-old Charles Bark, of Marengo, Illinois, and 24-year-old Justin Atchison, who was an assistant football and baseball coach at Willard High School.

Of the five non-fatal incidents, four were self-inflicted and the fifth occurred when the hunter shot a victim while swinging on game.

Conservation officials say hunters killed 290,339 whitetails during Missouri’s various deer hunting seasons in 2018-2019, an increase from the 284,477 whitetails that were taken in the 2017-2018 season.

By MADELINE FOX

Kansas’ new governor wants to fix the state’s foster care. Fast.

Laura Kelly isn’t the first governor to highlight a crisis in child welfare, or to inject cash into the Department for Children and Families.

Expectations run high for Kelly, who sat on a task force examining the child welfare system for more than a year. She’s made fixing foster care a high priority — it was one of just three topics she homed in on in her State of the State address last week.

But she’s hemmed in by some of the approaches she’s been handed, such as new grants to manage child welfare that she called “essentially no-bid contracts” and a lawsuit alleging Kansas rendered some of its foster children “effectively homeless.”

Here are five things to watch as Kelly works to make her mark in child welfare:

1) The high number of kids in the system

There were 7,300 kids in foster care in Kansas at the end of December. That’s an increase of more than 40 percent since 2012. The stress of so many kids in the system is straining mental health services, social worker caseloads and the state’s overall ability to adequately provide beds for the children in its custody.

Two main factors drive the increase: more kids in, and more time to get them out.

To help address the first, Kelly’s asked for money from the Legislature to fund more child abuse investigator positions and to draw down federal money for services that keep struggling families safely together.

Kelly wants money for about 26 new investigators.

Laura Howard, Kelly’s new head of the Department for Children and Families, said social workers field two or three times the recommended number of cases in some parts of the state. That makes it harder for investigators to catch problems or to take the time to connect families to community resources that could allow kids to stay in their home.

“Turnover is always an issue,” Howard said. “But it’s really been higher and more exacerbated in the last few years with those extensively high caseloads.”

Kelly also wants Kansas to put up more money for a federal matching program geared at keeping families out of the foster care system in the first place.

After DCF requested $4 million in state funds to go toward the Families First Prevention Services Act, child welfare advocates wrote an open letter asking for $30 million. Kelly isn’t going that far, but she has upped the Families First request to $7.4 million in this year’s budget and nearly $10 million next year.

Christie Appelhanz, who leads the organization that drafted the open letter, said that’s a start.

“We’re definitely headed in the right direction,” she said. “We’re not where we think we need to be just yet.”

Even if things improve on the front end, bringing down the number of overall kids in care will require getting kids out of the system and into permanent homes more quickly.

2) Whether DCF can recruit and retain enough social workers

Lawmakers are already skeptical DCF can find enough social workers to fill investigative jobs. Last year, DCF rolled back social work licensing requirements for some of its investigative positions. Officials said they had too many vacancies and not enough social workers to fill them.

Howard said she hasn’t looked yet at how the agency will fill 26 positions. But Becky Fast, head of the Kansas chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, said Kansas’ number of social work graduates and licensed social workers grows every year. It’s just a matter of convincing them to work for an agency experiencing a very public crisis.

“When I speak at colleges across the state, at least half the bachelor students raise their hands and want to work with children and families,” said Fast. “But they want to work in a system where they receive training, support and supervision.”

3) Who’s going to manage Kansas foster care moving forward

In November, then-DCF secretary Gina Meier-Hummel announced grants to five companies to manage foster care and family preservation.

The grants were awarded through a different process than the contract system that’s dictated Kansas child welfare since the state privatized foster care in the 1990s. State contracts go through the Department of Administration, but the new grants were scored and awarded directly through DCF.

When Kelly announced Howard as her pick to run DCF, Kelly also said she was putting those grants on hold.

Advocates have also raised concerns about one of the family preservation providers, Eckerd Connects It’s has drawn headlines over its foster care management in Florida that echo Kansas’ problems — kids sleeping in offices or moved night-to-night, kids skipping school, children harmed while in state custody.

With the current contracts set to run out at the end of June, Kelly and Howard don’t have much time to decide how to move forward with foster care. Howard said she doesn’t know yet what the agency will do about the grants, but she’s been carefully reviewing them.

4) What happens with the class-action lawsuit alleging Kansas violated its foster kids’ civil rights

In November, three organizations filed a class-action lawsuit contending Kansas violates foster children’s civil rights by moving them too often, adding to their trauma and restricting their access to necessary mental health treatment.

Some of the children described in the suit were moved more than 100 times during their stints in foster care, often from one one-night placement to the next.

The organizations sued then-governor Jeff Colyer and the then-heads of DCF, the Department for Aging and Disability Services and the Department of Health and Environment. With the governor’s office and the agencies turned over to new leadership, the lawsuit will soon transfer to Kelly, Howard and KDHE interim secretary Lee Norman.

The organizations suing aren’t asking for a payout. Their lawsuit calls for the agencies to fix gaps in mental health services and the churning of kids through short-term homes.

With the lawsuit landing in her lap, Kelly is under legal and political pressure to deliver the foster care fixes she’s called for.

5) What the numbers do — and don’t — tell us about whether foster care is improving

Although the number of kids sleeping in contractors’ offices has dropped substantially since its peak last spring — as of December, DCF officials said there had been no kids spending their nights in offices for months — advocates want to make sure improvements in one area aren’t leading to problems in another.

Appelhanz pointed to the lawsuit’s allegation of back-to-back single-night placements as one reason to be wary of better numbers.

“No one wants kids sleeping in offices,” said Appelhanz. “But moving them from sleeping in offices to repeated one-night placements? That’s not a win.”

Howard said she’ll also be measuring success based on the overall number of kids in care and whether they’re getting to permanent homes in a timely manner. She’s also trying to bring DCF up to federal standards for child welfare — standards by which the agency has previously fallen short.

Madeline Fox is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @maddycfox.