JACKSON COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating the circumstances that allowed a Kansas man being extradited from a Kansas City, Missouri Jail to Topeka on multiple Shawnee County warrants and tried to escape from a private inmate transport officer Wednesday afternoon, according to Sheriff Tim Morse.

Shortly before 1 pm the transport company arrived at the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office in Holton, Kansas to pick up an inmate being held on multiple Shawnee County warrants.

One of the private transport officers entered the jail awaiting the transfer of an inmate to their custody, while a second private transport officer escorted a second inmate 38-year-old Jacob Daniel Kull who was in their custody to a public restroom in the lobby of the jail.

Kull allegedly removed his handcuffs while in the restroom and assaulted the second private transport officer and fled the jail lobby.

Sheriff’s Deputies and Correction Officers subdued the him in the Sheriff’s Office parking lot.

He was arrested by Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputies for aggravated escape from custody and battery. Bond was set at $50,000.

Kull who waived extradition from Missouri was wanted out of Shawnee County for burglary, theft and forgery charges.

Kull also has previous convictions for burglary, theft, forgery and identity theft, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections.

 

GEARY COUNTY—Milford Lake will be a Cabela’s King Kat Championship Qualifier lake in 2019, according to an announcement from The Junction City/Geary County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“We are excited to have a Cabela’s King Kat Tournament at Milford Lake. This event will highlight the fishing at Milford Lake, provide positive exposure for our area and increase the economics of Geary County,” said Michele Stimatze, Director of the CVB.

The tournament is set for March 30, 2019 and is a two-person team event. The competition will provide the opportunity for a team to win a spot at the national championship. The tournament will be headquartered at Acorns Resort.

 

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas man accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl unsuccessfully argued that he should not be charged with taking advantage of a child because she was actually 16 under a Kansas law that says life begins at fertilization.

Defense attorney Cooper Overstreet argued in a motion that Jordan Ross, 21, of Topeka, could not be convicted of aggravated indecent liberties with a child because, under the state’s definition of life, the alleged victim would be 16, rather than 15. The age of consent in Kansas is 16.

“Because of recent statutory amendments establishing that life begins at fertilization, the alleged victim in this case should be considered by this court as nine months older than her date of birth,” according to Overstreet’s motion. “Because of this, at the time of the alleged incident, the alleged victim would have been 16 years old and thus a charge of aggravated indecent liberties is factually impossible.”

Douglas County District Court Judge James McCabria rejected Overstreet’s motion, The Lawrence Journal-World reported .

In arguing against Overstreet’s motion, Prosecutor Alice Walker cited a Kansas Court of Appeals opinion that said the state’s law defining life as beginning at conception applied to public health codes, not to criminal codes. Age is calculated by birth date, and redefining that to equate with “life beginning at conception” would “introduce an unacceptable uncertainty into the criminal law,” according to the opinion.

“Courts must construe statutes to avoid unreasonable or absurd results,” the appeals judges wrote.

Ross was scheduled to go to trial Monday but McCabria delayed the trial after Overstreet said he needed time to change his defense plan.

Ross was charged a year ago with raping the girl at a Lawrence party in August 2017, when Ross was 19 and the girl was 15. Overstreet had planned to argue the sex was consensual.

Recently, prosecutors added the alternative charge of aggravated indecent liberties with a child, which does not consider consent as a factor. The state needs to prove only that the victim was 14 or 15 when the sex occurred and that the defendant acted “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly,” Walker said in a court filing.

When the judge allowed the charge to be added, Overstreet filed the “life begins at fertilization” motion.

Stacey Donovan, the chief public defender in Shawnee County District Court and an adjunct professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, said she’s had sex crime defendants ask her to try the “conception” argument but she never did.

A hearing to set Ross’ new trial date is scheduled for Jan. 3. He remains free on $20,000 bond.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) – A new report says as much as $1.5 billion needs to be spent on Missouri’s higher education institutions to complete a backlog of maintenance projects.

The Missouri Department of Higher Education says in the report that the problems include cracked and peeling paint, water-damaged ceilings and walls, buckling floor tiles, aging plumbing and elevators that no longer meet code. The last time a similar review was conducted was 2009.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that part of the problem for all of the state schools stems from a state law limiting tuition from being raised above the rate of inflation. That leaves individual schools to rely on the state for added infrastructure costs. In recent years, however, state funding for higher education institutions has declined significantly.

MARYSVILLE, Kan. (AP) — An inmate has been sentenced to 47 years in prison for setting a fire and shooting at officers while escaping from a Kansas jail with another inmate.

Matson Zane Hatfield, 31, was sentenced Tuesday for attempted murder and other charges for the October 2017 escape from the Marshall County jail, near the state’s border with Nebraska.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation says Hatfield fled to a nearby home and later surrendered. A pickup truck also was stolen at gunpoint from a county employee. The KBI says 47-year-old Jeffrey Guenther was arrested after rolling the truck in Gage County, Nebraska.

The KBI says shots were fired at a Kansas fire department truck and at a man in front of a home. Charges are pending against Guenther.

KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A man whose abduction of a 10-year-old Kansas girl sparked a massive manhunt before she was found dead in Missouri has lost his appeal of his conviction and death sentence.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected the claims of 44-year-old Keith Nelson that his attorney had provided ineffective assistance. Nelson snatched Pamela Butler in 1999 as she was roller-skating near her Kansas City, Kansas, home.

A witness to the abduction got Nelson’s license plate, but he managed to get away. Pamela’s strangled body was found later in a wooded area in Grain Valley, Missouri.

Among the issues the appeal raised was his attorneys’ advise that he plead guilty. The court denied the appeal on each count.

KANSAS CITY (AP) — The case against a Kansas man who is fighting deportation to his native Bangladesh will go on until at least 2022.

Syed Jamal had the first hearing on his recently reopened case on Tuesday in Immigration Court in Kansas City, Missouri.

Judge Glen Baker said he would review whether Jamal qualified for certain forms of deportation relief. Jamal’s wife is also seeking relief from deportation.

Baker set the next hearing in the case for April 27, 2022.

Jamal is a chemistry instructor who came to the United States in 1987 on a student visa. He is married, the father of three U.S.-born children and has been living for years under a deportation order but with a valid work permit.

Jamal and his supporters began fighting his deportation since immigration agents arrested him in January at his home in Lawrence.

He was on a plane back to Bangladesh when a court ordered that he be removed from the plane in Hawaii and returned to the U.S.

By MADELINE FOX

Turmoil marks the troubled norm for foster care in Kansas.

Now political, financial and legal forces look poised to slam the system into a new level of chaos that makes seasoned child welfare professionals worried about a barrage of change.

A new governor and new legislators will take office in January. A task force examining foster care is preparing to present recommendations for dramatic change to policymakers new and old.

And a lawsuit filed by three organizations against state agencies says Kansas so bungles the care of kids in crisis it renders them homeless, shifting them one night after the next to new, unfamiliar, sometimes unsafe locations.

In the midst of all this, the state’s Department for Children and Families plans to blow up the system it’s used for more than two decades to delegate children’s care to private nonprofit companies.

Once courts pull children from troubled homes in Kansas, the practical work of finding them temporary or permanent homes largely gets handed off to private companies.

With new grants that go into effect July 1, DCF is splitting some jobs among more nonprofits. It’s turning children’s foster home choices over to a master software program. And the agency plans to switch foster care and family preservation to a grant system — meaning it’ll reach out to companies directly and skip the oversight of the state’s Department of Administration.

The grants have been awarded to three new players, in addition to the two current contractors.  Missouri-based Cornerstones of Care and Florida-based Eckerd Connects are moving in to handle family preservation, and former contractor TFI Family Services is returning to again pick up territory as a foster care provider.

But some, like family psychologist Wes Crenshaw, say adding agencies is just shuffling the puzzle pieces around rather than making a real fix. Crenshaw has worked with foster kids since before the state started delegating the care of foster children to private contractors in 1996.

“What magic,” Crenshaw said, “does a nonprofit out of Florida have to come to Kansas and sprinkle its pixie dust on our situation and make it better?”

Since 2013, just two providers have handled both foster care and family preservation in Kansas. KVC Kansas has the eastern half of the state. St. Francis Community Services handles the western half.

Both lost family preservation responsibilities in the new system. Cornerstones of Care will handle services to help keep families out of foster care in a handful of counties around Kansas City. Eckerd will pick up the rest of the state.

DCF Secretary Gina Meier-Hummel said fresh blood will mean new tools to get at child welfare problems.

“The more people you bring in,” she said, “the more resources you bring to the table, the better the outcomes for kids and families.”

But neither of those two new providers has run family preservation in Kansas before. Child advocates have reason to be skeptical of Eckerd. Its foster care programs in Florida have had many of the same problems that plague Kansas — kids sleeping in offices, rotating between one-night placements, and suffering abuse while in care.

That worries foster care advocate Lori Ross, who questioned why that didn’t concern the agency enough exclude Eckerd from its new grantees.

Eckerd’s checkered record springs from how it managed kids in its care. But as a family preservation contractor, it won’t actually have custody of kids. It’ll provide counseling, parenting classes and other services to families who are still together in their homes.

DCF attorney Kasey Rogg says the new system is structured to give DCF better oversight over how the outfits it hires spend the money. Rather than simply handing over a flat per-month payment for each contractor and a per-child payment, he said the grants aim to give DCF more accountability and oversight over how the state’s money is spent.

But advocates skeptical of DCF say that while it may mean more oversight of the contractors, it means less oversight of the state agency. Under the old system, contracts were awarded through the Kansas Department of Administration. Under the new system, DCF gets to award and administer the grants directly.

Ross worries that letting DCF directly award the grants could cloud who’s ultimately responsible for a child’s well-being.

The state did award a statewide foster care contract — not a grant — for DCF’s new placement matching system. It will allow DCF to keep a master list of available beds across both its grantees and the smaller child placing agencies that recruit and work with foster families.

That way, DCF can plug in basic details — age, gender, school district, allergies and the like — and find a list of all the beds in the child’s zip code that could take them in, regardless of who manages the bed.

The placement matching system is a bright spot even for child welfare advocates who are skittish about the other incoming changes to foster care and family preservation.

The two current contractors have been accused of placing kids in the homes licensed by their own agency first, before turning them over to other child placing agencies. Both contractors deny they hoard placements that way.

But with a central system with all the available beds logged dictating where kids go, advocates say kids are more likely to end up in homes that are best for them.

Publicly, many people who work with foster kids, foster parents, social workers and providers talk in upbeat tones about how the new grants might help. Privately, that’s replaced by fretting about whether DCF blowing up its system could breed years of chaos, and even worse care for children.

Christie Appelhanz, executive director of the Children’s Alliance of Kansas, an organization representing the current contractors and new grantees, says many are worried.

“People who have been through one of the contractor transitions before, they are definitely terrified — I don’t think is a stretch — about what’s to come,” she said.

University of Kansas social work professor Becci Akin says it’ll likely take 18 to 24 months after the contracts switch in July to tell if the changes are actually improving the lives of kids in peril.

For kids caught in parts of the state where those changes take place, that’s more uncertainty for their already uprooted lives. Pamela Robbins, head of the Kansas Foster and Adoptive Parent Association, remembers trying to adopt one of her daughters during a previous contract change.

In the 18 months it took to finalize her daughter’s adoption, Robbins said she had eight different social workers — including some they met only once.

“Little did we know,” Robbins said.

Social worker turnover has been high already. It’s a high-stress job. Workers deal with high caseloads full of traumatized children and, at times, angry or overwhelmed birth and foster parents.

The task force looking at Kansas’ child welfare system says they’re underpaid, though DCF says Kansas pays on par with the national average.

Akin, the KU professor, says the switch in contractors will bring more uneasiness. Many front-line social workers weren’t around the last time contractors changed in 2013. If they work in areas where the providers are changing, they could get anxious about their job security and switch agencies even before the new provider formally takes over.

Crenshaw, the psychologist who’s worked with foster kids for years, said paying enough to keep seasoned, knowledgeable providers working in the foster care system is the best way to keep kids on track as they move through a chaotic system.

“You can make up any act or grant, or name it anything you can call it — the Fluffy Happy Family World,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t have enough money to pay the people that matter and teach them and supervise them, you’re as doomed this week as you were last week.”

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

BOONVILLE, Mo. (AP) – A former school employee has pleaded guilty to a second charge of having sex with a student when he was 16.

28-year-old Clairyssa Lorenz, of California, Missouri, admitted last week in Cooper County to one count of felony sexual contact with a student. She was sentenced to 120 days of shock incarceration and probation. Last month, she pleaded guilty to an identical charge in neighboring Moniteau County.

Lorenz is a former elementary school counselor at Cole County R-1 Schools and a former assistant softball coach. The teenage boy told Moniteau County sheriff’s deputies in February that Lorenz had sexual intercourse with him on multiple occasions in June and July 2017. He said they also had a sexual encounter at her Cooper County home.