WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A former Wichita YMCA employee accused of sexually assaulting two young girls at the center has pleaded no contest to rape charges.

The Sedgwick County District Attorney’s office confirmed 22-year-old Caleb Gaston entered the pleas on Friday. Gaston is accused of raping a 4-year-old girl and sexually assaulting a 3-year-old in January 2018.

The alleged assaults happened in the Kid Zone at the downtown YMCA in Wichita.

Gaston worked at the facility as a part-time employee for five years before his arrest, which came after a woman reported her daughter had been molested.

Gaston has been jailed on a $1.1 million bond for more than a year. He will be sentenced April 26.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Sprint officials say they have a deal to sell the company’s sprawling campus in Overland Park, Kansas.

CEO Michel Combes said in a note to employees on Friday that the deal with Occidental Management is expected to close in the coming months.

The terms of the deal were not released.

Occidental will lease part of the campus that Sprint still uses back to the company.

Combes told employees campus operations will continue as they currently are after the sell is complete.

Occidental Management is a Wichita-based company with property holdings in the Kansas City area.

As of late last year, 6,000 Sprint employees and contractors worked at the Overland Park campus. Sprint occupies 11 of the 20 campus buildings.

TOPEKA—The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday affirmed a Saline County District Court ruling from August 2016 that denied Andrew Woodring’s efforts to withdraw his plea in the death of 17-year-old Allie Saum.

According to a media release from court, Woodring was a participant in a vehicular shooting that resulted in the death of Saum in May 2015. According to information from the Kansas Supreme Court document, the state charged him with one count of premeditated first-degree murder, or, in the alternative, felony murder; one count of attempted first-degree premeditated murder; one count of criminal discharge of a firearm at an occupied vehicle; one count of conspiracy to commit aggravated battery; and one count of interference with law enforcement.

Woodring, who was 17 years old at the time of the shooting, was charged as an adult. At that time, it was alleged he provided and drove the car used in the shooting and that he also contacted the shooter and suggested that he bring a gun with him on the drive.

On April 18, 2016, Woodring entered into an agreement to plead no contest to felony murder in exchange for the state’s agreement to dismiss other charges, the Kansas Supreme Court document states.

Then on June 6, 2016, Woodring filed a motion to withdraw his plea. On August 10, 2016, Saline County District Judge Rene Young denied the motion. Woodring was sentenced to a term of life imprisonment with a minimum mandatory sentence of 25 years before he would be eligible for parole, the Kansas Supreme Court document states.

In the decision released Friday, Kansas Supreme Court Justice Eric Rosen, writing for a unanimous supreme court, affirmed the district court, noting that the facts supported guilt under an aiding and abetting theory and the mere existence of time pressure for deciding whether to go to trial is not necessarily so coercive as to compel a court to allow a defendant to withdraw a plea.

MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — State prosecutors are seeking a retrial after a jury could not reach a verdict on one charge against a 38-year-old Manhattan man charged with trying to kill three law enforcement officers.

Prosecutors say Mark Harrison fired 33 shots during a standoff with police in January 2018.

A Riley County jury could not reach a unanimous decision Thursday on an attempted capital murder charge involving the shooting of Riley County police Sgt. Pat Tiede, who was hit in the leg.

The jury found Harrison not guilty of two attempted murder charges stemming from Harrison shooting at a SWAT vehicle with two officers inside. He was found guilty of criminal damage to property.

Prosecutors say Harrison, who was working as a research associate at K-State’s mechanical and nuclear engineering department at the time, fired at Tiede, then barricaded himself inside his home and surrendered after a three-hour standoff.

 

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Chaos erupted outside Texas’ death chamber Thursday night when the son of the condemned inmate pounded on the chamber windows, shouted obscenities and threw fists after his father spoke his final words.

Billie Wayne Coble, a Vietnam War veteran who killed his estranged wife’s parents and brother and threated to do the same to her in 1989, told the five witnesses he selected to attend his execution that he loved them. Coble nodded at them as they watched from the witness room, adding: “Take care.”

When he finished speaking, his son, a friend and a daughter-in-law became emotional, throwing fists and kicking at others in the death chamber witness area. Officers stepped in but the witnesses continued to resist, and were eventually moved to a courtyard where the two men were handcuffed. They were arrested on charges of resisting an officer.

“Why are you doing this?” the woman asked. “They just killed his daddy.”

As the men were being subdued outside, a single dose of pentobarbital was being administered to Coble. He gasped several times and began snoring inside the death chamber at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was pronounced dead 11 minutes later, at 6:24 p.m.

The 70-year-old Coble was the oldest inmate executed by Texas since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982. He was convicted three decades ago for the August 1989 shooting deaths of Robert and Zelda Vicha, and their son, Bobby Vicha, at separate homes in Axtell, which is northeast of Waco.

Prosecutors once described Coble as having “a heart full of scorpions.”

Coble, distraught over his pending divorce, kidnapped his wife, Karen Vicha. He was arrested and later freed on bond. Nine days after the kidnapping, Coble went to her home, where he handcuffed and tied up her three daughters and nephew, J.R. Vicha, according to investigators.

Coble then went to the homes of Robert and Zelda Vicha, 64 and 60 respectively, and Bobby Vicha, 39, who lived nearby, and fatally shot them.

After Karen Vicha returned home, Coble abducted her. He drove away, assaulted her and threatened to rape and kill her. He was arrested after wrecking the vehicle in neighboring Bosque County following a police chase.

Coble was convicted of capital murder in 1990. An appeals court ordered a new trial on punishment in 2007, but a second jury also sentenced him to death.

J.R. Vicha, Bobby Vicha’s son, was 11 when he was tied up and threatened by Coble during the killings. Coble’s execution would be a relief knowing the execution finally took place, said Vicha, who eventually became a prosecutor in part because of his father.

“Still, the way they do it is more humane than what he did to my family. It’s not what he deserves, but it will be good to know we got as much justice as allowed by the law,” he said ahead of the execution.

“This is not a happy night,” added McLennan County District Attorney Barry Johnson. “This is the end of a horror story for the Vicha family.”

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Coble’s request to delay his execution. His attorneys had argued that Coble’s original trial lawyers were negligent for conceding his guilt by failing to present an insanity defense.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles also turned down his request for a commutation.

Coble’s attorney, A. Richard Ellis, told the courts that Coble suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his time as a Marine during the Vietnam War. Ellis argued that Coble was convicted in part because of misleading testimony from two prosecution expert witnesses on whether he would be a future danger.

Coble was the third inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the second in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.

J.R. Vicha, 40, still lives in the Waco area. His father was a police sergeant in Waco when he was killed, while his grandfather was a retired plumber and his grandmother worked for a foot doctor.

Vicha is working to get a portion of a highway near his home renamed in honor of his father.

“Every time I run into somebody that knew (his father and grandparents), it’s a good feeling. And when I hear stories about them, it still makes it feel like they’re kinda still here,” Vicha said.

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By JOHN HANNA

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas lawmakers have hit the halfway point of their annual session and they haven’t had a hearing on a Medicaid expansion plan or pushed an education funding bill out of committee in the face of a court mandate to boost spending on public schools.

And the GOP-dominated Legislature doesn’t just appear to be slow-walking new Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s big initiatives. Despite Republican supermajorities, an income tax relief bill that GOP leaders consider an urgent priorityhasn’t cleared both chambers.

Top Republicans began a long weekend Thursday by arguing that lawmakers’ annual 90-or-so-day session is not unusually sluggish and that committees have laid a foundation for key debates in March and early April. But the first big votes on a wide range of big issues — including school funding, Medicaid expansion and even abortion — aren’t coming until after the second half starts next week.

The lack of movement on school funding raises the most questions about whether lawmakers are dawdling too much. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled last year that funding isn’t sufficient, and the state must tell the court by April 15 how it fixed the problem. The Republican attorney general urged lawmakers to pass a bill by March 15; Kelly called on them to do it by Thursday.

“I don’t know that I’m happy with the amount of work we’ve done,” said state Sen. Randall Hardy, a moderate Republican from central Kansas. “I would have preferred to see school finance dealt with already. I would have liked to have had a discussion about Medicaid expansion.”

Kelly took office last month promising a bipartisan governing style , joining new Democratic governors in Michigan and Wisconsin in breaking the GOP’s lock on their state governments. Her supporters believe voters repudiated her GOP predecessors’ conservative fiscal policies and want quick action to help schools and expand the state’s Medicaid health coverage for the needy.

Yet the new governor seemed destined to clash with top Republicans. The Legislature emerged from last year’s elections more conservative, and GOP leaders are a formidable obstacle to Medicaid expansion and other Kelly initiatives. Republican leaders’ top priority is seeing that individuals and businesses don’t pay more in state income taxes because of changes in federal tax laws at the end of 2017.

Kansas legislators typically don’t start making decisions about the state budget even in committee until March, and the final decisions on the biggest issues often get crammed into a frenetic week in May or occasionally even early June. Also, the Legislature is still far from its record 114-day sessions in 2015 and 2017, when taxes and school funding also were big issues.

“All the big stuff is still out there but, you know, that’s what the second half is for,” said House Majority Leader Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican.

But educators and some legislators, particularly Democrats, are restless about school funding because Kansas is stuck in the last stage of a lawsuit filed in 2010 by four local school districts. A Democratic effort to short-circuit the committee process failed this week in the Senate.

“It’s disappointing that the Legislature is not demonstrating urgency to meet the court deadline,” Kelly said in a statement Thursday. “It’s time for legislative leaders to put politics aside and focus on meeting the needs of our students and teachers.”

Republican leaders said a school funding bill is coming soon, and a Senate committee has a hearing set for next week on Kelly’s plan to boost education funding by roughly $90 million a year.

The Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings in recent years to force lawmakers to increase spending. A law enacted last year will phase in a $548 million increase in aid to the state’s 286 school districts by the 2022-23 school year.

The court declared it still isn’t sufficient to provide a suitable education for every child because the law didn’t properly account for inflation in recent years. Mark Desetti, a lobbyist for the state’s largest teachers’ union, said the fix is “within easy reach.”

“Just put in the additional amount of money for the inflation factor and you’re done in court,” Desetti said.

But Republican leaders contend it’s not that simple. For one thing, they question whether the state can sustain the extra spending over time without increasing taxes.

Several also said they also want to consider whether the extra dollars should be targeted to programs for at-risk students. Others contend that the state should strive to hold schools accountable by making data about students’ performance more accessible to parents.

Meanwhile, Republicans face their own frustrations with the tax relief bill. The Senate passed the measure three weeks ago, with all but two of the 28 Republicans supporting it.

Before approving it this week, a House committee added a politically popular provision to decrease the state’s sales tax on groceries. GOP leaders considered having the full House debate the bill within days, but opted to wait, acknowledging that they need to get a better handle on members’ views.

“We wanted to provide tax certainty for Kansans, because they’re filing their income taxes right now,” said Senate President Susan Wagle, a conservative Wichita Republican. “I am disappointed that they haven’t seen it as a priority.”

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