TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Topeka man has been ordered to serve a life sentence with no chance of parole for 50 years in a 2012 killing.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that Troy Allen Robinson apologized before he was sentenced Monday for the stabbing death of 43-year-old Oma Bennett. A relative of Bennett yelled out that Robinson wasn’t sorry and was ordered to be quiet.
The Hard 50 sentence was the first imposed in Shawnee County since the Legislature passed a new version of the sentence.
Judge Nancy Parrish called the killing “extremely brutal and senseless.” She also sentenced Robinson to consecutive sentences of 34 months for aggravated burglary and 12 months for misdemeanor theft.
Bennett’s family could have sought restitution, but the prosecution said they didn’t want anything from Robinson.
Ellis County emergency officials are continuing their efforts to prepare for the possibility of an Ebola-infected person in Ellis County.
County Health Administrator Butch Schlyer said first responders have been very active in discussing how to deal with a potentially infectious person or persons, including drills in Hays.
Recently, Ellis County emergency officials took part in Ebola drills at Fort Hays State University and Hays Medical Center.
Schlyer said local officials will continue to have meetings and drills, but he has been impressed with HaysMed’s containment training and said is comfortable the region is prepared for dealing with the virus.
“We know where we are going with this,” Schlyer said. “Our community partners have been well versed on this.”
Ellis County Emergency Medical Services Director Kerry McCue said despite the fact that HaysMed is the most prepared facility in western Kansas to deal with an infectious disease outbreak, hospitals are being instructed to not transport patients to places like Hays.
According to McCue, if a patient is confirmed to have the Ebola virus, that patient cannot be transported without contacting the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
“When KDHE gives their approval, that patient would not be moved to Hays Medical Center or Salina Regional,” McCue said, “they would be moved to one of approximately 35 hospitals across the country.”
The closest is Omaha, Neb.
The Sedgewick County bioterrorism/biosafety unit would be responsible for transferring the patient to the treatment center.
Schlyer said the next step is to hold small meetings and continue to discuss containment plans with core individuals.
Due to the observance of the Christmas holiday, refuse/recycling route schedules for Wednesday, Dec. 24, and Thursday, Dec. 25, will be altered as follows:
Although collections may not occur on your normal day, collections will be completed by the end of the week.
Crews anticipate that the collection routes will be as followed:
• Tuesday and Wednesday’s collection schedule will be picked up on Tuesday, Dec. 23.
• Thursday and Friday’s collection schedule will be picked up on Friday, Dec. 26.
• There is no anticipated change to Monday’s collection schedule.
For more information, call (785) 628-7357. Bags should always be out on the day of collection no later than 7 a.m.
Fortunately for most us, we won’t ever have to experience the encounters Alvin Plucker has lived. Plucker, 68, was one of 82 American sailors captured by the North Koreans in 1968 onboard the USS Pueblo.
The American spy ship was intercepted by North Korean ships approximately 16 miles off the shore of North Korea Jan. 23, 1968.
Plucker recounted his ordeal at the local Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter No. 939 annual dinner this month at the Hays American Legion.
“The captain at the time said, ‘I’m not going to sacrifice my crew. I’ve got no way to scuttle the ship, destroy the classified information or man the guns,’ ” Plucker recalled.
Plucker joined the Navy after running away from his Nebraska home. Following training, he was sent on a mission on the USS Pueblo, an intelligence-gathering ship. Plucker was the ship’s quartermaster.
After crew members were captured, they were transported to a prisoner of war camp in Pyongyang, North Korea. There, the men withstood 11 months of torture and interrogations.
“If you ever know what fear and cold is, you just stand there and shake uncontrollably,” Plucker said. “We’d been briefed to say that we were in international waters — and we did.”
North Koreans believed the vessel was in its territory when it was intercepted. The Pueblo crew members were tortured because they would not admit to this.
“They would come and tie you up and bind you to a 2-by-4 in a crouch-like position,” Plucker said. “They’d lay on your back for a little while and, if that didn’t work, they’d sandwich your head in a 2-by-4, but we never gave in.”
Plucker also spoke of “Hell Week,” an 11-day period during their stay when the captured men faced even more extreme torture from the guards.
“They worked us all day and night and made us write all new confessions,” Plucker said. “(As a form of punishment), they made me hold two heavy wooden chairs with a bayonet at my throat and said, ‘We’ll see how long you’ll last now.’
“After a little while, they had tortured you so much that you just became numb.”
The USS Pueblo crew members were released from the North Korean camp on Dec. 23, 1968, approximately 11 months after capture.
Plucker now resides just north of Denver near Fort Collins, Colo.
John Richard Schrock is a professor at Emporia State University.
Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times reported a presentation by Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California system, with the headline “UC’s Napolitano throws cold water on the online education craze.” While the shortcomings of these modern correspondence courses are apparent to most veteran teachers and professors, this was the first time that a major university leader has dared proclaim that the digital emperor has no clothes. And Napolitano detailed her objections.
According to the LA Times, in front of an audience of 500, she proclaimed” “It’s not a silver bullet, the way it was originally portrayed to be. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and by the way if you do it right it doesn’t save all that much money, because you still have to have an opportunity for students to interact with either a teaching assistant or an assistant professor or a professor at some level.”
Napolitano challenged the assertion that online courses might serve students needing remedial math or English: “I think that’s false; those students need the teacher in the classroom working with them.”
She likewise pointed to the growing evidence that when students are shut off from direct interaction with faculty, that they’re “less happy and less engaged.”
The LA Times placed her comments in the context of the recent California disaster with giving every K-12 student an iPad: “A good example is Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy’s misbegotten iPad program, which threatens to saddle the L.A. schools with overpriced, obsolescent tablet computers that leave students uneducated.”
They also reported on another disaster that had just occurred next door: “The emblematic case is that of San Jose State University, which partnered with Udacity, a Silicon Valley start-up that [California Governor] Brown had talked up, on several introductory online courses. As was learned last July, more than half the enrolled students flunked, and the university had to put the program on hold for retooling. The revised program has shown better results, but that’s only after considerable human outreach and interaction. The experience only underscores what Napolitano said: Online learning is no silver bullet.”
This craziness over online courses appears to primarily be an obsession and bragging point for about one-third of higher education administrators. This difference in attitude between the teaching professionals and administrators obsessed with marketing and branding is evident in the recently released “2014 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology,” a 44-page report that can be accessed at www.insidehighered.com.
There is still low regard for online courses among faculty. The findings of this annual survey conducted by Gallup® should give many students pause in taking an online course, let alone pursuing a whole degree program delivered online.
“Few faculty members (9 percent) strongly agree that online courses can achieve student learning outcomes that are at least equivalent to those of in-person courses.” However, 36 percent of technology administrators strongly agreed.
Of course, universities hire technology officers to make the delivery of these courses possible. You would expect that most would support online as a superior method—and you would be wrong. Across eight specific areas measured, the majority of university technology officers did not support the view that “online courses are of better quality than in-person courses.” And “less than half of faculty and technology administrators strongly agree that their institution offers instructors strong support for online learning….”
Only one-sixth of university faculty strongly support their university’s expansion of online course offerings. And “most faculty do not feel that they have been appropriately involved with decision making surrounding the expansion of online course offerings.”
Napolitano’s exposé that the online emperor has no clothes does not come as a surprise. The University of California–Berkeley has an ongoing faculty policy of not accepting transfer online courses in the performing arts or lab sciences. To claim to teach acting, music performance, and lab skills online defies commonsense. But having a university administrator who has commonsense and is willing to speak out—well, that is a surprise.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Keurig is recalling some 7 million of single-serve coffee brewing machines because of reported burns.
Keurig says its Mini Plus Brewing Systems, with model number K10, can overheat and spray water during brewing. Keurig says it had received about 200 reports of hot liquid escaping from the brewer, including 90 reports of burn-related injuries.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released details on the recall Tuesday. The recalled brewers have an identification number starting with “31” printed on the bottom. They were sold online and in stores in the U.S. and Canada between 2009 and 2014.
Consumers are being urged to call Keurig Green Mountain Inc. of Waterbury, Vermont, at 1-844-255-7886 to arrange for free repair.
Strong northwest winds are expected today, particularly across far western Kansas where gusts as high as 60 mph are possible. Some snow is possible, with the best chances in Trego and Ellis counties where up to an inch may accumulate. Little or no snow accumulation is expected farther south in Dodge City, Liberal and Pratt. Across south central Kansas, temperatures may be warm enough in Medicine Lodge for rain to be mixed with the snow. Today A 50 percent chance of snow, mainly after 7am. Cloudy, with a high near 35. Windy, with a north northwest wind 16 to 26 mph, with gusts as high as 36 mph. Total daytime snow accumulation of around an inch possible.
Tonight A 20 percent chance of snow before 8pm. Cloudy, then gradually becoming partly cloudy, with a low around 21. Blustery, with a north northwest wind 17 to 23 mph.
Wednesday Sunny, with a high near 40. North northwest wind 7 to 16 mph becoming west southwest in the afternoon.
Wednesday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 25. South southwest wind 5 to 9 mph.
Christmas Day Mostly sunny, with a high near 49. South southeast wind 7 to 17 mph.
Thursday Night Partly cloudy, with a low around 25. Blustery.
December 22, 2014 Esther Klay Melissa Jarboe documents the medical treatments her husband, Jamie, endured after being shot during a tour of duty in Afghanistan in April 2011. Jamie Jarboe underwent dozens of surgeries, including a procedure in which his esophagus was perforated, before he died in March 2012. Melissa Jarboe started a foundation called the Military Veteran Project and advocates for additional investments in veteran-supported nonprofits and the Veterans Administration health system.
By Andy Marso
KHI News Service
TOPEKA — A sniper’s bullet tore through U.S. Army Sgt. Jamie Jarboe’s neck while he was on patrol during a tour of duty in Afghanistan in April 2011. The bullet shattered three vertebrae, severed Jarboe’s spinal cord and caused severe bleeding. It was the kind of wound that almost certainly would have been fatal in previous conflicts.
But an Army medic was at Jarboe’s side almost immediately to keep him from bleeding out, and within 17 minutes of the shooting a helicopter lifted Jarboe out of the danger zone. In less than an hour, he arrived at a state-of-the-art field hospital in Kandahar, where a medical team was waiting to stabilize him enough so that he could be evacuated from the country.
Jarboe arrived back on American soil paralyzed but alive and was able to get the best care the military had to offer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
But less than a year later he was dead from complications of surgery, one of several medical errors that his wife, Melissa Jarboe, documented in a self-published memoir about her husband’s last months.
“It wasn’t the sniper that shot him that killed him,” Melissa Jarboe, of Topeka, said in a recent interview.
Rather, it was a mistake made during a surgery that took place in May 2011 that eventually killed Jamie Jarboe. A surgeon in training nicked Jarboe’s esophagus. Dozens of attempts were made over the next nine months to repair the damage. But none of them worked. Jarboe died in March 2012.
Jamie Jarboe’s story illustrates a military medical system that is better than ever at saving lives on the battlefield but has not kept pace when it comes to ensuring quality of life for the severely wounded once they come home.
Growing VA problems
An estimated 2.6 million American men and women served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than half now receive government medical care through military facilities, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs or TRICARE, which provides coverage for private-sector care to military members and their families.
In the last year media and congressional investigations have documented widespread problems in the VA medical system. Stories about veterans being forced to wait months for treatment and accounts of wounded veterans receiving inadequate care forced U.S. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki to resign as secretary of the department in May.
But Melissa Jarboe said overhauling the VA leadership is not enough to provide veterans the long-term support they need. Jarboe, who started a foundation called the Military Veteran Project in honor of her husband, said investments are needed in veteran-supported nonprofits and the VA health system.
Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who has studied the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said in a phone interview that VA backlogs that led to Shinseki’s departure were the short-term consequence of failing to anticipate the influx of new patients into the veterans medical system and build the VA capabilities accordingly.
Larger consequences are on the horizon, she said, if Congress doesn’t start preparing now for the long-term medical needs of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans — whose care she estimates is likely to cost at least $1 trillion.
“The longer-term problem is we now have a large liability sitting on the books and nobody has made any provision to pay for it,” Bilmes said. “Actually, I should correct myself. The liability exists, but it’s actually not sitting on the books. It’s not accounted for, but it’s there. There is no strategy for how we’re going to pay these obligations.”
Overburdened system
Melissa Jarboe tried several times to have her husband transferred from a VA hospital in Richmond, Va., before she was finally successful.
By then she had become well-versed in medical procedures and drugs for those with spinal injuries and wary of some of what she saw of her husband’s care.
“I started seeing inconsistencies in the medical procedures,” Jarboe said. “I started seeing the staff being short-staffed. Medical equipment was not functioning properly. Individuals without proper experience were doing new-wave surgeries without consent or communication to us as a family on what they were going to do.”
Jarboe started sleeping at her husband’s bedside after she arrived early one morning to find he had been taken to surgery without anyone notifying her.
Despite the issues, Jarboe did not blame the medical staff so much as their working conditions.
“The doctors are so short-staffed because of the wages they get, and then the nurses, they’re overworked and understaffed as well,” Jarboe said. “So they compromise the level of training and education needed to get in because it’s like, ‘We need you now.’”
Within the past year, emergency services at Topeka’s Colmery-O’Neil VA Medical Center had to be cut back due to doctor shortages. Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, introduced a bill in Congress to allow qualified physicians from outside the VA system to volunteer their services at VA facilities in an attempt to quell shortages nationwide.
The VA’s annual budget rose from $61.4 billion in 2001 to $140.3 billion in 2013. In large part, the increase is due to the rising cost of health care and the burgeoning number of new VA patients returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bilmes’ research found that as of 2013, 56 percent of the veterans of those conflicts were receiving government medical care, a higher percentage than after past conflicts.
Bilmes said that prior to 2001 there were about 26 million U.S. veterans and 4 million using the VA. Now there are about 21 million veterans and 6.5 million using the VA. The deaths of World War II veterans have reduced the overall numbers, but the influx of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and aging Vietnam veterans, has increased the number of them needing medical care.
The new VA patients have increasingly complex cases. More than a third of new returning veterans have been diagnosed with a mental illness such as depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, contributing to a doubling in the Army suicide rate.
Armored vehicles helped more soldiers survive the improvised explosive device blasts that were the weapon of choice for insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the blasts contributed to traumatic brain injuries suffered by more than 200,000 veterans. They also caused widespread tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears that can be debilitating.
Bilmes said other health problems stem from conditions on the ground during those wars, including carting heavy packs long distances and living in the extreme heat and desert sand.
Multiple deployments in those conditions contributed to large numbers of veterans coming home with musculoskeletal pain, rashes and eye problems, often in addition to mental illness.
“The average claim of a veteran coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan has 10 disabling conditions on it,” Bilmes said.
About 50,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are considered “polytrauma” patients, meaning they’ve suffered multiple traumatic injuries. That includes more than 1,600 with significant brain injuries, 1,400 amputees and nearly 1,000 with severe burns.
Bilmes found that the facility now known as Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland treated more than 100 returning amputees each year from 2010 to 2012, during the Afghanistan “surge.”
Many of them later turned to VA hospitals for expensive prosthetic care, an ongoing medical cost.
According to data released by spokesman Jim Gleisberg, the VA Eastern Kansas Health Care System, which includes hospitals in Topeka and Leavenworth, has treated between 18 and 23 cases of burns and/or amputations each year since 2011, at a cost of about $300,000 in the most recent fiscal year.
Those wounds are expensive, but Bilmes said the number of veterans returning with horrific injuries is a “tiny, tiny fraction” of those with some sort of service-related condition that qualifies them for benefits. That number is likely to grow, she said, because service-connected conditions tend to crop up as veterans get older and their bodies break down.
She said the government has spent about $2 trillion on the recent wars and can expect to spend another $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion going forward to treat those who served in them. That doesn’t include social and economic costs, and Bilmes said she’s likely underestimating the final tab.
“I’ve tried to be pretty conservative in my assumptions, and every year the numbers are coming out higher than what I’ve predicted,” Bilmes said.
Debt-financed wars
During World War I and World War II, the U.S. sold bonds and asked citizens at home to sacrifice by eating from “victory gardens” and submitting to rationing.
However, the most recent wars were financed largely through debt. Bilmes said she was disturbed to see that method used again in August to provide $15 billion in emergency aid to the VA.
“Not only have the rest of us not fought in the war, we haven’t actually paid for it either,” Bilmes said. “We just put it on the national credit card. But the funding of current veterans benefits by putting that on the card is sort of a new and disturbing financial approach.”
The emergency bill allowed $10 billion for veterans who live more than 40 miles from a VA medical facility to get services at private hospitals and another $5 billion to help VA facilities hire more staff.
She said the ad hoc spending method leaves veterans in danger of having their benefits reduced or eliminated in the future.
“We’re in the middle of a national mood that is favorable to veterans,” Bilmes said. “Congress could (someday) just decide there isn’t enough money, and they could cut these benefits. It’s unlikely, but they could.”
Her research found that as of last year the United States had spent about $260 billion in interest on the $2 trillion in debt it incurred fighting the wars, which accounted for 20 percent of the total debt accumulated by the country during the war years.
Bilmes said she has long supported the establishment of a war tax or bond sales to support a national veterans trust fund. She testified for the fund before the U.S. House of Representatives Veterans Affairs Committee in September 2013.
Melissa Jarboe and Jetaime Parker work for the Military Veteran Project, which Melissa founded to honor her husband Jamie. The Topeka-based nonprofit assists veterans and their families as they navigate the military medical system.-Photo by Andy Marso
But Jarboe said she’s wary of the idea of a trust fund, a large pot of money she fears could be misappropriated.
“Who’s going to manage the trust fund?” Jarboe asked. “That’s scary to me.”
However, she does want to see more resources put into support for veterans, through both the VA and organizations like the Military Veteran Project. She’s learned that the needs are too big for anything less than a national commitment.
“I thought when I started a small little nonprofit in Topeka, Kansas, I would basically advocate and empower and honor veterans,” Jarboe said. “That was my goal. But when I started digging into some of the cases, people would contact us from all around the world, all across the nation, at all hours of the day, and some of the cases were just inconceivable.”
Jarboe said voters should hold elected officials accountable for their rhetoric about supporting veterans. She says she prefers to stay out of politics and is wary of politicians who frequently reach out to her foundation. The one exception is former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, himself a wounded World War II veteran and Kansan, who wrote the foreword to Jarboe’s memoir.
“He’s never once asked me for a photo (with him),” she said. “I like him.”
Jarboe watched her husband endure more than 100 surgeries in the final year of his life. She believes some of the procedures were unnecessary and certainly outside the experience of the doctors who performed them. Walter Reed Army Medical Center closed a few months after he was treated there.
Jarboe has learned that the “Feres doctrine” complicates, and in some cases prevents, suing the federal government for medical malpractice in military or veterans hospitals. She’s also learned that military and VA doctors are not regulated by the medical boards in the states where they practice. While she wants more accountability for military and VA medical personnel, Jarboe said she’s not necessarily interested in suing anyone for what happened to her husband.
She wants to work within the system to make it better for other military families.
“Even through everything my husband endured and everything we’ve seen, we’re still very pro-government, pro-military, pro-VA,” Jarboe said. “Because there’s no way I can go up against and fight with them. Why not work with them and help them change things with the power of numbers?”
“There’s no sense in pushing more negativity out,” she added. “I’ve already had enough negativity in my life to last a lifetime. I’m good. Plus, my husband told me not to.”
Andy Marso is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Christmastime is here. And a new poll reveals the cards and gifts that are part of celebrating the holiday aren’t just exchanged among those who share the Christian beliefs behind the story of the Magi who gave the first Christmas gifts.
According to the Associated Press-GfK poll, 77 percent of Americans plan to exchange gifts this holiday season and 48 percent will send greeting cards. The gift-giving set includes about 8 in 10 Christians and 73 percent of those who say they have no religious beliefs.
Greeting cards also cross denominational lines, with 53 percent of Protestants, 55 percent of Catholics and 40 percent of those without religious beliefs saying they will send cards this year.
MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — Riley County police say they’ve mainly stopped using processing room videos in drunken driving cases because they often are detrimental to their cases.
Police Director Brad Schoen says defense attorneys often used the video recordings to poke holes in DUI cases, so his department stopped making them unless there was a problem with recordings from police vehicles.
The Manhattan Mercury reports County Commissioner David Lewis asked about the department’s recording policy after being contacted by a defense attorney who said the videos were becoming scarcer.
Schoen says it doesn’t make sense to make the processing room tapes when recordings from police cruisers are enough to establish probable cause.
Attorney Jeremy Platt called the department’s policy on the recordings “antiquated.”
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle has created a new committee to handle criminal justice issues and named new chairmen for two other panels.
Wagle announced the changes Monday. She is a Wichita Republican, and all committee leaders are Republicans because of the GOP’s 32-to-8 majority.
Wagle created a Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee. Criminal justice issues have been handled by the Judiciary Committee, but it’s long been seen as overburdened.
The new committee’s chairman is Sen. Greg Smith of Overland Park.
Wagle named Sen. Rob Olson of Olathe as Utilities Committee chairman. He replaces former Sen. Pat Apple of Louisburg, who now serves on the state’s utility regulatory commission.
Olson gave up the chairmanship of the Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee. It went to Sen. Jeff Longbine of Emporia.
MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Agriculture Department says the more than 130 farmers markets across the state are economic engines for communities.
The agriculture department said in a news release Monday that it is teaming up with the Kansas Department of Health and to host a farmers market conference next year that aims to help those community markets succeed. The two-day conference begins Feb. 28 in Manhattan.
Stacy Mayo is director of the department’s ‘From the land of Kansas’ program. She says the conference is designed to strengthen markets by providing information, resources and tools.
The conference includes workshops and sessions designed to help farmers market managers, vendors and community stakeholders.
ELLSWORTH–Private Nelson Cook, Ellsworth, returned home after successfully completing 13 weeks of recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, Calif.
Cook will be on 10 days of leave before reporting for additional training at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Afterward, he will receive additional training for his Military Occupation Specialty, Electronics, at 29 Palms, Calif.
Cook is a May 2014 graduate of Ellsworth High School.
He is the son of Brian and Jan Bontrager, Ellsworth.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Topeka man has been ordered to serve a life sentence with no chance of parole for 50 years in a 2012 killing.
