CALIFORNIA, Mo. (AP) — Authorities say a 17-year-old has drowned after jumping into a central Missouri creek.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol says Bradley Hall, of Fulton, struggled in North Moreau Creek before going under water around 8 p.m. Wednesday. He didn’t resurface and was pronounced dead a short time later.
The area is near the town of California, which is located 25 miles southwest of Columbia.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Saturday on the sidelines of the G-20 political summit in Osaka, Japan. Politico says both leaders are under mounting economic and political pressure to end their trade war. It’s a high-stakes meeting that may or may not mark a turning point in the negotiations after talks slammed to a halt back in May.
Each side’s top trade official got things going with a phone call this week. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He spoke on the phone on Monday. Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are expected to get together with their Beijing counterparts before Trump and Xi go face-to-face on this weekend. Trump’s trade war is taking a huge toll on U.S. farmers and causing major uncertainty for American businesses.
Financial conditions in agriculture have gotten much worse, with that weakness starting to show up in lending data and threatening the broader rural economy. Xi faces economic growth in China that’s lagging, food prices are soaring, and his administration could take a hard knock if Trump follows through on his latest tariff threat.
GALENA, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri woman whose 13-month-old son weighed only 10 pounds when he died has been convicted of manslaughter and child neglect.
A Stone County jury convicted Bambi Jackson, of Reeds Springs, on Wednesday for the January 2016 death of Justus Jackson, who emergency responders found not breathing when they went to the family’s home.
The boy’s official cause of death was low blood pressure and dehydration.
His father, Joshua Jackson, entered an Alford plea to involuntary manslaughter in 2018.
Prosecutors say Bambi Jackson did not provide adequate care for her son and did not immediately seek medical attention when she discovered he wasn’t breathing.
Defense attorneys argued she didn’t knowingly cause harm to her child.
The couple’s five other children have been removed from the home.
O’FALLON, Mo. (AP) — A man charged with the 1993 abduction, rape and killing of a 9-year-old Missouri girl has now been charged with molesting another child.
The two sodomy counts were filed Wednesday against 61-year-old Earl Cox.
St. Charles County Prosecutor Tim Lohmar says investigators digging into Cox’s past before he was charged with Angie Housman’s death discovered that he had been arrested in 1989 for molesting a 7-year-old girl at a park behind Angie’s elementary school. That led to the revocation of his parole in a child molestation case involving four girls he babysat while stationed at an Air Force base in Germany. He was released 11 months before Angie was killed.
Investigators also are looking into allegations that Cox had inappropriate contact with another 7-year-old girl.
CUERVO, N.M. (AP) — Authorities say a Missouri woman has died in a car crash on a New Mexico highway that injured eight other people including six children.
New Mexico State Police say 63-year-old Mary Lee Kelley of St. Louis was a passenger in a van that crashed about 6 a.m. Wednesday on Interstate 40 east of Cuervo.
She was declared dead at the scene.
Police say the van driven by a 30-year-old St. Louis woman struck an unoccupied SUV that was parked on the highway’s shoulder.
The driver was treated at the scene for undisclosed injuries and an 18-year-old female passenger was airlifted to an Albuquerque hospital for treatment. Their names weren’t released.
Police say six children in the van were transported to a hospital with injuries not believed to be life threatening.
KANSAS CITY (AP) — A man accused of threatening to shoot people in an underground business complex in Kansas City is charged with making a terrorist threat.
Clay County prosecutors charged 45-year-old Kevin Becknal on Wednesday.
Becknal, of Orrick, had been fired days earlier from one of the businesses at the Hunt Midwest SubTropolis, which is a massive subterranean network of businesses in old limestone mines.
The Kansas City Star reports that court records say Becknal returned to the complex Tuesday and told a former co-worker to call a supervisor. He said he had 45 bullets to “shoot people around here.”
Becknal drove off about 10 minutes later but police didn’t know, so they closed the caves and told workers to remain in their offices.
Becknal was arrested later in Prairie Village, Kansas, and remains in the Johnson County jail on a bond of $50,000.
TOPEKA, KAN. – A woman who operated massage parlors in Lawrence and Topeka was sentenced Wednesday to three years on federal probation for operating a prostitution business, according to U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister.
In addition, the defendant agreed to pay a $650,000 judgement, which represents the proceeds of the crime.
Weiling Nielsen, 54, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy. Nielsen owned and operated Naima Asian Massage and Serenity Health Spa in Lawrence, as well as Jasmine Massage in Topeka. In her plea, she admitted the massage parlors provided sexual services to customers for payment in cash. Nielsen and others advertised the services on the internet. Nielsen and her husband deposited cash into various bank accounts and purchased money orders for deposit in bank accounts in California.
McAllister commended the FBI, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, the Topeka Police Department, the Salina Police Department and Assistant U.S. Attorney Christine Kenney for their work on the case.
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — Authorities say two men held an employee at a Missouri car dealership at gunpoint and stole a truck they were test driving.
Police say the theft ended when the suspects crashed the pickup truck.
Twenty-year-old Garrett Eagle and 43-year-old David Edens are charged with first-degree robbery in the case.
The Springfield News-Leader reports a probable cause statement says the two men asked to test drive a 2014 Dodge Ram pickup on June 18 at Wehr RV in Springfield.
The statement says the men eventually refused to return the truck. Edens allegedly pointed a gun at the employee and threatened to shoot her.
A short time later, Eagle crashed the truck and the employee was able to escape.
Neither man has an attorney listed for this case.
By JOHN HANNA
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A recent Kansas Supreme Court ruling declaring that the state constitution protects access to abortion opened the door to a new legal attack on the death penalty.
Attorneys for five of the 10 men on death row in Kansas argue that the abortion decision means the state’s courts can enforce the broad guarantees of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Bill of Rights in the Kansas Constitution. The lawyers contend the convicted killers cannot be executed because capital punishment violates their “inalienable” right to life.
They include Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., a white supremacist convicted of killing three people at two Jewish sites in the Kansas City area in 2014, and Jonathan and Reginald Carr, two brothers who, authorities said, forced five people to remove money from ATMs and have sex with one another before killing four of them in Wichita in 2000.
Defense attorneys launched the new legal attack on capital punishment in filings with the state Supreme Court in May, less than two weeks after the abortion decision. The justices took the claims seriously enough to order defense attorneys and prosecutors to file additional written arguments, with the last ones due in mid-November.
“It hasn’t been argued under the Kansas Constitution, at least, not in the way we are presenting it in these cases,” Meryl Carver-Allmond, an attorney for two of the men. “This is a new argument.”
The Kansas Supreme Court’s abortion ruling in April was the latest in a long list of decisions that have angered conservative Republicans in the GOP-controlled Legislature. It said the state’s Bill of Rights grants a right to “personal autonomy” that includes access to abortion.
Four of the seven justices were appointed by Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and two by moderate Republican Gov. Bill Graves. The seventh, the only dissenter in the abortion case, was appointed by conservative GOP Gov. Sam Brownback.
Past decisions in capital murder cases also have sparked anger. Kansas’ last legal executions were in 1965, by hanging, and the state enacted its current death penalty law in 1994.
The court has yet to rule in Miller’s case. In 2014, the court overturned death sentences for the Carr brothers in two separate rulings. Those decisions helped fuel unsuccessful election campaigns in 2014 and 2016 to oust all but Brownback’s appointee. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the rulings, sending the Carrs’ cases back to the Kansas Supreme Court. The cases are pending.
Republican Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt told The Associated Press this week that the abortion decision “opened the door for a wide range of new litigation.”
“There is a certain irony that a case regarding abortion is now being urged by some as a reason to upend the death penalty in Kansas,” Schmidt said. “I think that’s just the start, because this holding was so sweeping. I think it’s not just going to be abortion.”
In 2001, in its first ruling under the state’s current death penalty law, the Kansas Supreme Court rejected an argument that the state constitution grants a right to life barring executions for crimes. Defense attorneys now argue that the abortion decision provides grounds for reconsidering that conclusion.
David Lowden, an assistant district attorney, argued in filings this month in the Carr brothers’ cases that it remains a “vast legal reach” to argue that capital punishment violates the state constitution.
Jeffrey Jackson, a Washburn University of Topeka law professor, said the right to life has never been interpreted to include freedom from being executed for a capital crime.
“When you’re trying your client from being executed, you find all the stuff. Your requirement is that you make all the arguments that you can credibly make,” Jackson said. “I just think that this one’s — it would not withstand scrutiny.”
Richard Levy, a University of Kansas law professor, said the abortion ruling suggests the Kansas court might recognize rights for the state’s residents that aren’t recognized nationally. Levy said he has doubts that the Kansas Supreme Court would declare capital punishment violates the state constitution but added, “I don’t think the argument is frivolous.”
“I think it’s more likely that the end result would be the death penalty is still constitutional but more safeguards have to be applied in Kansas than at the national level,” Levy said.
LEXINGTON, Mo. (AP) — The mayor of a Missouri town resigned Tuesday, citing hatred, attacks and lies about him on Facebook.
Lexington Mayor Fred Wiedner wrote an open letter to the city saying the job was no longer worth the battle.
In the letter, Wiedner says he didn’t sign up for the “mess.”
Wiedner says the trouble began in February when the City Council voted to fire the city administrator, a popular longtime resident. Wiedner says he is comparatively new to town and the public blamed him.
Wiedner says the situation led to continued social media criticism that he decided he didn’t want to spend time defending.
Lexington, about 50 miles east of Kansas City, has fewer than 5,000 residents.
