SALINA, Kan. (AP) — A judge has ruled that a Salina man was mentally competent when he stood trial for murder in 2011.
Saline County District Court Judge Patrick Thompson on Tuesday denied Thomas Jenkins’ motion to dismiss his conviction for first-degree murder in the June 2009 death of 24-year-old Alfred Mack Jr. in Salina.
The Kansas Supreme Court sent the case back to the district court last October to decide the competency issue. Prosecutors acknowledged that a competency hearing that was ordered for Jenkins in 2010 was never conducted and he was on suicide watch before the trial.
The Salina Journal reports a psychotherapist found him competent for trial in 2010.
Thompson heard testimony from the judge, prosecutor, defense attorney and others who interacted with Jenkins at the time of the trial.
GREAT BEND- A Barton County Sheriff’s Deputy received minor injuries in an accident just before 8 a.m. on Wednesday in Great Bend..
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2013 Dodge Sheriff’s vehicle driven by Sierra C. Thorne, 24, Otis, was westbound on 24th Street.
The vehicle made a left turn onto Harrison Street in front of a 2001 GMC passenger vehicle driven by Zachary L. Meeks, 16, Great Bend.
The GMC broadsided the Dodge. Thorne received minor injuries. A private vehicle transported her to Great Bend Regional Medical Center according to the KHP.
Meek was not injured.
The KHP reported both drivers were properly restrained at the time of the accident.
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GREAT BEND- A Barton County Sheriff’s Deputy was involved in an accident just before 8 a.m. on Tuesday.
Barton County Sheriff Brian Bellendir said the 2-vehicle accident occurred at the intersection of 24th Street and Harrison in Great Bend.
There were no injuries and no ambulance was called.
The Kansas Highway Patrol is working the accident and will have additional details.
Check the Post for more information as it becomes available.
The 2015 All-Girls Nationals in Chicago kicked off with a record 360-plus registered players. This is the annual All-Girls Chess Championships that has been hosted for the last 12 years.
Sheena Zeng from TMP played the under-12 section, competing against approximately 70 other girls. She won four games and drew two games. She got a total of 5/6 points. Four girls who received five points, but because of Sheena’s higher tight break she took the crown for second place in the tournament.
“Sheena has been working hard to prepare for this tournament,” said Michelle Zeng, Sheena’s mother. “She tried to balance between her school work, and she set aside at least 30 minutes to one hour a day to train on chess. She studied chess on her own plus having lesson with a chess grandmaster from Serbia two hours a week. Her hard work paid off. Her quest for next year is to be No. 1 in her section at the All-Girls National.”
Three Hays City Commissioners will be sworn into office shortly after the start of Thursday night’s commission meeting.
Incumbent Henry Schwaller IV, and newcomers Lance Jones and James Meier will be administered the oath of office by city clerk Brenda Kitchen.
The governing body will then be reorganized with the election of mayor and vice-mayor. Schwaller currently serves as mayor and Eber Phelps is vice-mayor. Shaun Musil is the fifth Hays city commissioner.
Commissioners will conduct a public hearing for special assessments in the
Golden Belt Estates 5th Addition and 46th Street 2nd Addition followed by ordinance approval to assess the cost of improvements to property owners in both additions.
The meeting begins at 6:30p.m. Thursday, April 23, in Hays City Hall.
This possibly was going to be Tonnica Ouellette’s final home performance for the Fort Hays State University rodeo team.
So she wanted it to be a special weekend. That it was, and then some.
A senior from Yoder, Colo., Ouellette will finish her bachelor’s degree in exercise science at FHSU this summer and immediately begin working on her degree in cardiac rehabilitation.
In the upper portion are sisters Tennille and Tonnica Ouellette from Yoder, Colo., sitting atop a horse nearly 20 years ago as preschoolers. The lower portion are the sisters today, as members of the Fort Hays State University rodeo team.
She made the hearts of friends, family and fellow rodeo members skip a beat Sunday in Doug Philip Arena at the 49th annual Fort Hays State Rodeo.
Ouellette came out of the gate fast in the short-go of the goat tying event and finished with a time of 8.3 seconds.
That was good enough to move her all the way up to second in the average, just a half point behind champion Shayna Miller from Oklahoma’s Panhandle State University, the leader in the Central Plains Region. It also helped the FHSU women finish fifth in team standings in the 27-team field.
“To make the short-go in this region is really an accomplishment,” said Bronc Rumford, head coach for the FHSU team. “It’s the largest region and the most competitive region in the country.
“Half a point …” Tonnica said, her voice trailing. While she might have been disappointed coming so close to being champion in her event, her coach wasn’t.
“She’s a competitor,” Rumford said. “But to finish second was great, especially in one of the most competitive events in college rodeo. There are so many variables that can go right, or wrong, in a split second.”
Ouellette, the only FHSU rodeo team member to qualify for the championship round at their home rodeo, was competing for so many more than just herself.
There was her younger sister, Tennille, a fellow FHSU team member who barely missed making Sunday’s goat tying finals, and their mom, Lycrecia, a former FHSU goat tyer herself who drove four hours from her home in Colorado to be with her daughters for the weekend. There was her older brother, Tyrell, who lives in Texas and wasn’t able to make the trip to Hays. And there was their late father Michael, who died in a drowning accident on a family horseback riding outing when his girls were 11 and 9 years old.
Tied for fourth after the long-go on Saturday and making the top 10 finals list among 70-some goat tiers already was exciting for Ouellette and her family.
It got even better Sunday.
The first one to greet Ouellette after her performance was her mom, who was video taping the event and gave her oldest daughter a big hug afterward.
Lycrecia doesn’t miss very many college rodeos in which her children are competing, but this one was particularly important. It also was likely the last home rodeo for Tennille, who has one year of eligibility left but is on track to graduate in December with a degree in agricultural business and then look for a job.
“There’s more to life than rodeo,” said Lycrecia, who admitted it was a bittersweet weekend. “It’s been a great ride, and they won’t quit rodeo. They will always be involved with rodeo somehow.”
The Ouellette sisters both wound up at Fort Hays State after starting their college rodeo careers at different community colleges.
They liked the size of Fort Hays State — and the size of its rodeo team. Now, both compete in the same two events their mother did at FHSU — goat tying and breakaway roping.
“You don’t have to compete with so many kids to practice,” Tennille said as the siblings began to name the pluses of competing for the FHSU rodeo team.
“They have an indoor and outdoor facility here,” Tonnica added, “and they pay for your diesel and hotels on the road. They really take care of you.”
And, FHSU is their parents’ alma mater.
“There were lots of things that pulled us here,” said Tennille, who lives with her older sister in a country home just outside Hays.
Michael Ouellette, a farmboy from Concordia, and Lycrecia Hill, a cowgirl from the Topeka area, met while both were working for the Fort Hays State University dairy back in the mid-1980s.
They married in 1987, started a family, moved to Colorado and wound up in a country home near Colorado Springs with room for their horses.
Michael hadn’t grown up around rodeos. Lycrecia, daughter of professional cowboy Larry Hill, was born into a rodeo family.
“I taught him about rodeo,” Lycrecia said. “I gave him that bad habit.”
Their children all started riding horses from the time they could sit up on one, and the Ouellette sisters riding together, one behind the other, became a familiar sight.
Their family worked together and played together until that one fateful day in 2004 that changed their lives forever.
Lycrecia, faced with raising three young children on her own after her husband’s death, said she was able to cope and survive because of the support she received from their rodeo family.
“People asked me if we were leaving (Colorado) after that,” Lycrecia said. “My rodeo family is what kept me here. My husband is buried within 3 miles of here. I couldn’t leave.”
Nor could she take her children away from rodeo.
“Staying here, they were able to still be involved in rodeo, which was really important to all of us,” said Lycrecia, an elementary school teacher in Ellicott, a small town about 25 miles east of Colorado Springs.
And, Tonnica said, there’s still a slim chance she might decide to rodeo one more year in college.
“We make this about their education,” Rumford said of his students. “Rodeo is not the No 1 priority, or even No. 2. Their education is first, and they have jobs and family to think about, too.”
“So whichever way she decides to go is fine with us,” he added.
Coincidentally, oldest Ouellette sibling Tyrell — four years older than Tonnica — also competed at the Fort Hays State Rodeo, as a member of the team from Oklahoma’s Panhandle State University. The Ouellette sisters and the rest of the FHSU team will close out their 2014-15 season this weekend at the Panhandle State Rodeo.
Lycrecia is confident all three of her children are the better for having participated in rodeo.
“The relationships you build are second to none,” she said. “We live the cowboy lifestyle. We’re country people. Cowboy’s in our blood.”
Tonnica agreed.
“I look at rodeo as kind of a stepping stone,” she said. “The work ethic and perseverance you learn, those cowboy values you can carry with you throughout your life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
COUNCIL GROVE, Kan. (AP) — An American Indian tribe is returning to its land in northeast Kansas, beginning with a ceremony Saturday.
The Kaw Nation, also called the Kanza, will perform ritual dances Saturday south of Council Grove. It is a step toward establishing a gathering place to educate, promote and preserve the American Indian heritage for a tribe for which the state of Kansas is named.
The Wichita Eagle reports the dances will be performed at the site of the last Kaw villages in Kansas before the Kaw was forced to move to Indian Territory in Oklahoma in 1873.
On Feb. 28, 2000, the Kaw Nation bought 146.8 acres of land along the Little John Creek near Council Grove. It has been working with the state to re-establish its ties to Kansas.
By RON WILSON Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development
Fun Day. No, not Sunday, as in the first day of the week or an ice cream treat. I refer to an event called Fun Day in Courtland. For 50 years, the rural community of Courtland has put on a community Fun Day.
Luke Mahin is the economic development director for Republic County and is the one who told me about Fun Day in his hometown of Courtland.
Ron Wilson is director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University.
In 1964, businessmen in Courtland wanted to have a community celebration. It morphed into an annual community picnic and much more. It is called Courtland Fun Day. Posters, koozies and t-shirts commemorate the event yearly.
The event is held annually on the last Saturday of July. During the week preceding Fun Day, called Fun Week, a downtown clean-up is held on Monday. “Everybody pitches in to clean up the town,” Luke said. “They will literally bring brooms downtown and sweep the sidewalks.” Talk about a hands-on way to take responsibility for your community’s well-being!
Wednesday is the set-up day for the entertainment stage, seating, and displays downtown. Activities begin on Friday and continue with a full day on Saturday. The number of activities is incredible for a community this size.
Friday night has often featured a barbecue contest and talent show, with local bands performing. Tickets for this contest have been known to sell out in 10 minutes. Twelve to fourteen cookers compete in the barbecue contest. In addition to ribs and shrimp, one can find such delicacies as fried pickles and barbecue cupcakes.
Saturday is a huge day. The beer garden is located in an empty lot on main street, with parachutes providing shade Activities vary from year to year depending on the theme, but over time they have included such things as a bake sale, sand volleyball tournament, cake walk, hot air balloon rides, three-on-three basketball tournament, mutton bustin,’archery shoot, 5K fun run, a rock-paper-scissors tournament, and much, much more.
Courtland has found ways to celebrate its agricultural assets and build on them. For example, the parade includes lots of tractors and combines. A plastic duck race takes place at the local irrigation canal. (There are those agricultural assets.)
A hay tarp is set up with water running over it to be a belly slide. The corn pile features a huge mound of kernels of field corn in which the local bank has placed donated coins for the kids to dig and find. (Sounds like agricultural assets again.)
Another big draw is the pit chicken barbecue. Huge numbers of half-chickens are slow-cooked on an open-air cooker. One of the guys who helps cook is a character named Tater. The liquid concoction which he shares with the other cooks is called Taterade.
In contrast, a live chicken can be found in another contest called Chicken Bingo. For this contest, one buys a chance on a particular square, and the winner is determined by where the chicken drops its droppings. (Another agricultural asset, but not exactly a game of skill.)
Some hilarious attractions from previous years were brought back in 2014. These include the belly dancers (a bunch of big guys with their bare bellies painted in various designs), the ladies who do a choreographed precision dance with their lawn chairs, and Republic County Riverdance (a bunch of guys in tank tops, kilts over cutoffs, and workboots, dancing to Celtic music). On top of everything else (pun intended), a ping pong ball drop will drop into city park hundreds of ping pong balls marked with prizes.
“I look forward to this more than Christmas,” Luke Mahin said. For the 50th anniversary celebration, some 3,000 people attended. That’s a remarkable achievement for a rural community like Courtland, population 285 people. Now, that’s rural.
Fun Day. Not Sunday, but the Courtland Fun Day celebration in Courtland. We salute Luke Mahin and all the volunteers who are making a difference with their creative ways of holding a community celebration. It makes for a very fun day.
And there’s more. Luke also works with a remarkable Internet marketing company. We’ll learn about that next week.
Paul G. Dietz, 96, of Russell, Kansas, died on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, at the Great Bend Regional Hospital in Great Bend, Kansas.
Services are pending at this time. Please check back later for a full obituary and service information. Pohlman-Varner-Peeler Mortuary of Russell is in charge of the funeral service arrangements.
Lois (Deardorff) Holland, 96, passed away on Friday, January 30, 2015, in Kaiser North Hospital in Sacramento, California.
Lois was born with her twin sister, Loise, in Southeast Kansas on November 24, 1919 and grew up with her parents, Ray and Elva Deardorff, and siblings, brother Dean and sister Loise, in Waldo, Kansas, through the time of her graduation from High School at Waldo in 1938. She later moved to California to be closer to her brother and with the onset of World War II became a civilian employee at the airplane repair facility at McClellan Field located near Sacramento, California, where the infamous B-25’s used in the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo were modified and prepared for deployment. Her mechanical aptitude gained her the opportunity to serve as an engine inspector at this facility.
It was during her time at McClellan where she met her adult life long friend, Beverly Hill (Searg), then a Sergeant in the military, and her husband, “Curly” Holland. To this union was born a son, Dana, on September 24, 1945. After the end of World War II and the death of her husband, she provided for her family by working at notable department stores and camera shops in the Sacramento area until her retirement. After retirement, she moved to Garden Valley, California where she lived with her Father and Beverly until both had passed.
She was preceded in death by her parents, Ray and Elva Deardorff, husband “Curly”, her brothers, Paul and Dean, and sister Loise. She leaves her son Dana and wife Darlene, grandsons Scott and Jason and wife Denise, and great-grandchildren Kevin and Katlan, her niece Lois Dee Valente, and nephews Merle Deardorff, Howard Bean, Ted Bean and their families.
A memorial service to celebrate Lois’ life will be held at 10:30 A.M. on Saturday, April 25, 2015, at the Amherst Church in Waldo, Kansas, with Pastor Les Rye officiating. Pohlman-Varner-Peeler Mortuary of Russell is assisting the family with the arrangements.
MANHATTAN — A native Kansan and former U.S. senator for nearly two decades will receive an honorary doctorate from Kansas State University.
Nancy Kassebaum Baker will be recognized with the honorary doctorate degree at the Graduate School‘s commencement ceremony at 1 p.m. Friday, May 15, in Bramlage Coliseum. She also will serve as the commencement speaker.
The awarding of the honorary doctorate follows the approval by the Kansas Board of Regents. It is one of the highest honors the university can give.
“Nancy Kassebaum Baker’s nearly two decades of leadership as a U.S. senator are evidence of her dedication to service and diplomacy,” said Kirk Schulz, university president. “We want to honor her distinguished career. Through scholarships and the Landon Lecture Series, Kassebaum Baker and her family have maintained strong ties with Kansas State University. Their support, leadership and example of service play an essential role in helping Kansas State University become a Top 50 public research university by 2025.”
Kassebaum Baker graduated from Topeka High School. In 1954, she received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kansas. In 1956, she earned a Master of Arts in diplomatic history from the University of Michigan. Her ties to Kansas State University date from 1966 when the Landon Lecture Series on Public Issues was inaugurated as a tribute to her father, former Kansas Gov. Alfred Landon. Her four children are Wildcats and graduated in the 1980s.
She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1978. During her tenure she served on the Foreign Relations Committee, the Budget Committee, the Commerce Committee, and Labor and Human Resources Committee. In 1996 she declined to run for a fourth term. She later served on several nonprofit boards, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation. She is past chair of the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and the George C. Marshall Foundation. She helped secure the acquisition of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in 1996-2004.
In 1996, she married Howard Baker, former U.S. senator from Tennessee and Senate majority leader, who also served as chief of staff under President Reagan. President George Bush appointed Baker to serve as U.S. ambassador to Japan, and from 2001-2005 the Bakers lived in Tokyo, Japan. Currently, Kassebaum Baker lives on her farm in Morris County, Kansas.
To honor Kassebaum Baker’s career, Kansas State University offers theKassebaum Scholarship to recognize students who aspire to careers in public service. Up to five students receive this award annually.
Mickey Ruth (Foster) Armbrister, age 68, of Ellis, passed away Tuesday, April 21. 2015 at her home.
Memorial services will be 11 AM, Saturday, April 25, 2015, at St. John Lutheran Church located 7 1/2 miles north of Ellis. Family will be present at the church Saturday 10 AM until service time.
A complete obituary is pending with Keithley Funeral Chapel 400 E 17th Ellis, KS 67637.
Angelina McMillan, age 62, died April 21, 2015, at the St. Catherine Hospital in Garden City, Kansas. She was born May 12, 1953 in Leoti, Kansas, the daughter of CP and Mary Flores Medina.
On July 24, 1982 she was united in marriage to Fredrick McMillan at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Garden City, Kansas.
A resident of the Garden City community sine 1973, moving from Leoti, Kansas. She worked as a homemaker.
She is survived by:
Two Sons Adam McMillan of Garden City, Kansas
Benjamin McMillan of Garden City, Kansas
One Daughter Colleen McMillan of San Angelo, Texas
Three Brothers Frank Medina of Weskan, Kansas
George Medina of Newton, Kansas
Raymond Medina of Liberal, Kansas
Five Sisters Petra Cantu of Leoti, Kansas
Adelida Marra of Blackwell, Oklahoma
Chris Collum of Blackwell, Oklahoma
Patricia Worf of Garden City, Kansas
Maria Medina of Garden City, Kansas
Four Grandchildren.
She was preceded in death by a brother Sam Medina.
Memorial Services will be held at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Garden City, Kansas, Monday, April 27, 2015 at 11:00 A.M.
Vigil Service will be held at the church Sunday, April 26, 2015 at 6:30 P.M.
Burial will be held at a later date.
Memorials in lieu of flowers St. Mary’s Catholic School care of of Price & Son Funeral Home in Garden City, Kansas.
