Great Bend Post

ELLSWORTH COUNTY -What if a significant crime took place in a large public setting? What if there were dozens of eyewitnesses or people that might be able to shed some light on the incident?

You would think having multiple witnesses or sources of information would be a positive thing. What do think the chances are that each individual has the same story?

Ellsworth County Sheriff Tracy Ploutz says he is in a similar situation trying to get to the bottom of an investigation involving an alleged sexual assault on a Great Bend High School activities bus.

“If you’ve ever played the game where they stand two lines together, tell the first person the story and share it to the person behind them and by the time you reach person in back of the line the story isn’t close to what started,” said Ploutz.

“That’s not what I’m dealing with here but you just have to weed it out,”

Ploutz said he chose to interview everyone that was on the bus including the bus driver, two coaches, and most of the swim team members.

Ploutz mentioned the parents of two students choose that their children not speak to investigators.

The process of scheduling interviews and traveling back and forth from Great Bend to Ellsworth County has caused the case to take longer than most people expected.

Ploutz says he now projects the investigation will be turned over to the Ellsworth County Attorney’s Office soon.

While Ploutz is dealing with the case that allegedly happened in Ellsworth County, the Saline County Sheriff’s Office has turned over a separate sexual assault claim from a 15-year old Great Bend High School swimmer to the Barton County Sheriff’s Office.

The boy and a parent went to Salina last weekend to report a sexual assault on the swim team bus on February 3. After an investigation, Saline County determined the incident occurred in Barton County and handed over the investigation to the Barton County Sheriff’s Office.

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A Lenexa man has admitted he stabbed two men to death during a burglary at their home.

Alex Brune pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of first-degree murder in the July 2014 deaths of 47-year-old Brian Baskind and his stepfather, 79-year-old Clifford Preston at the men’s home in Lenexa. Brune was scheduled to go to trial on Monday.

The Kansas City Star reports each count carries a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. Prosecutors said they will ask that the sentences run consecutively when Brune is sentenced May 18.

One of the victims shot Brune during the altercation. Brune told police he had been kidnapped by a stranger and driven to the house, where he stabbed the men while trying to escape.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The National Transportation Safety Board says an airplane that crashed at a Wichita airport in 2014 was in the air for only 26 seconds and 120 feet.

The Beechcraft King Air B200 crashed into a FlightSafety building at the Eisenhower National Airport, killing four people.

The Wichita Eagle report the NTSB released its factual report on the crash Friday. The report precedes a ruling on what caused the crash.

The report says pilot Mark Goldstein, one of those who died, radioed that his left engine was malfunctioning before the impact.

The report said investigators found no maintenance record discrepancies that would have affected the plane’s performance. The airplane’s last major scheduled maintenance was completed nine days before the crash.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Nature Conservancy of Kansas plans to use a $2 million gift to improve stream conservation in the state.

The gift from the David T. Beals III Charitable Trust is the largest gift the organization has ever received. Nature Conservancy officials said Wednesday the money will be used to establish a statewide stream conservation program.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports (https://bit.ly/1QgRSTt ) the Nature Conservancy owns 46,000 acres in Kansas. It also leads conservation efforts in the Flint Hills, Red Hills and Cheyenne Bottoms.

The organization plans to work with private landowners on techniques that limit livestock and crop runoff into streams. That work will start occur mostly in rural areas once the agency finds a stream that needs rehabilitation. A program manager is expected to be hired by this spring.

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — An Olathe woman will stand trial in the death of her newborn daughter, whose body was found in a trash can.

Twenty-year-old Marissa Carol Fields is charged with first-degree felony murder and aggravated abandonment of a child. After a preliminary hearing Friday, Fields’ attorney entered not guilty pleas for her.

Prosecutors say Fields gave birth at home in December 2014 after not telling anyone she was pregnant.

The Kansas City Star reports (https://bit.ly/21zo3Va ) she told police the child was born blue and was cold to the touch. She said she put her in plastic bags and in the trash can because she was in shock.

Medical testimony Friday indicated the baby was born alive and took at least one breath. The baby was full term and had no injuries.

KANSAS CITY – A Missouri man was sentenced Tuesday to two years on federal probation during which he is banned from hunting for stealing a tractor and hunting in Kansas in violation of the federal Lacy Act, according to U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom. In addition, he was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine, and $6,894 in restitution.

Thomas Morgan, 31, Blue Springs, Mo., pleaded guilty to one count of transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines and one count of violating the Lacy Act, which prohibits interstate transportation of wildlife that was illegally taken.

In his plea, Morgan admitted a Rice County deputy stopped him in November 2013 after Morgan had been hunting deer in Stafford County without a license or deer permits.

Morgan had been illegally hunting in the dark. Investigators found deer heads in his car. A search warrant at his home turned up heads, antlers, skulls and capes of deer.

During the investigation, agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service learned Morgan was involved in the theft of a Kubota tractor in Miami County. The tractor was found at Morgan’s residence.

Grissom commended the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, the Rice County Sheriff’s Department, the Miami County Sheriff’s Department and Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Oakley for their work on the case.

By ANDY MARSO

The plaudits for Sen. Greg Smith came from points across the political spectrum this week as he shepherded a juvenile justice overhaul bill through the Kansas Senate.

Smith, a Republican from Olathe, Kansas who chairs the Senate Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee, devoted a full week of hearings to Senate Bill 367, which seeks to refocus the juvenile justice system on rehabilitation rather than confinement.

He also allowed a week for stakeholders to try to hammer out their differences after the hearings. And that was after studying the issue for months between legislative sessions as co-chairman of a volunteer workgroup that included experts in corrections and the law .

Several Senate colleagues praised Smith before passing the bill 38-2 on Tuesday and sending it to the House.

“When you have major legislation, this is exactly how it should go through the process,” said Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Republican from Sedgwick, Kansas who is considered more centrist than the conservative Smith.

Smith said he initially was skeptical of the drive to move away from housing offenders in 13 group homes known as youth residential centers that serve as lower-level confinement than the state’s two juvenile prisons in Topeka and Larned.

But the more research he read, the more convinced he became that the Kansas system was “warehousing kids instead of working to find solutions” that keep juveniles from reoffending.

“The goal of the juvenile justice system is rehabilitation by its very definition,” Smith said. “The Kansas model does nothing to exhibit that.”

Smith said the “vast majority” of Kansas kids in the residential group homes are low-level offenders, and the homes that would be closed under the bill are a mixed bag. Some are doing well at reintegrating offenders, but some are not.

The bill would free $2 million for evidence-based recidivism programs that Smith said would be more effective and could serve up to 460 kids.

“That’s almost the entire juvenile justice system,” Smith said. “Two million dollars is a great start.”

Sen. Laura Kelly, a Democrat from Topeka, also praised Smith’s work, but with one caveat: The shift to community-based rehabilitation will only work, she said, if the state commits long-term to properly funding the local recidivism-fighting programs.

“I’m really concerned about whether we’re going to do what we did when we shut down the state hospitals” in the 1990s, Kelly said. “We did not have the infrastructure in place with the community mental health centers to handle it.”

Smith said that if the bill becomes law, planning would begin in July to have community-based programs ready when the group homes close in mid-2018.

He also said his background as a former police officer and the father of a murder victim means his colleagues can trust that he would not support the bill if were too accommodating of juvenile offenders or insensitive to their victims.

“You all know my law enforcement history,” said Smith, who wrote an editorial for the Wichita Eagle outlining the bill and the process behind it. “I am not soft on crime.”

At a news conference Tuesday another Democrat, Sen. Marci Francisco of Lawrence, said she hoped Smith’s deliberate, well-researched approach to juvenile justice reform could be a model for debate on other issues, like Medicaid expansion.

“What we understood from that process was it was an effort to actually have a committee spend time hearing testimony, looking through all different proposals from various groups, vetting that and having that time,” Francisco said. “That’s what we need to address Medicaid expansion. I think that would be impossible to do on the (Senate) floor but very possible to do in committee.”

Andy Marso is a reporter for KHI News Service in Topeka, a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor team. You can reach him on Twitter @andymarso

JOAN LOWY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government watchdog says federal regulators are failing to refer serious safety violations involving freight rail shipments of crude oil for criminal prosecution.

A report by the Department of Transportation’s inspector general also says the Federal Railroad Administration doesn’t have a complete understanding of the risks involving more than 400,000 tank cars of oil shipped across the country annually. The watchdog says the FRA only looks narrowly at operations in specific regions, not the nation as a whole.

There has been a series of fiery oil train explosions in the U.S. and Canada in recent years, including one just across the border in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people.

The agency’s complex records system also makes it difficult for inspectors to access safety information on rail operations outside their region.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Wichita police officials say their department is receiving federal funds to complete its purchase of body cameras for its officers.

The federal government on Friday informed the Wichita Police Department it could spend $250,000 in matching funds for its Body Worn Camera Program.

The money will be used to purchase cameras for the department’s south and west patrols. When the program is fully implemented, 429 Wichita patrol officers will be equipped with the equipment.

Police Chief Gordon Ramsay said Friday the cameras will help boost accountability for the officers wearing them.

The matching funds were made available through a policy and implementation program that’s designed to give agencies already using body-worn cameras the money they need to expand their programs.

TOPEKA  – In response to Kansas Supreme Court decisions issued on Friday, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt issued revised consent forms for use by all law enforcement agencies in Kansas involving investigations of suspected driving under the influence (DUI) offenses.

The Supreme Court this morning struck down as unconstitutional a Kansas statute that made it a crime for a driver to refuse to allow his blood alcohol content to be tested when he is suspected of DUI. As a result of the court decisions, parts of a form – called a DC-70 – that law enforcement officers are required by law to read to drivers during certain DUI investigations no longer are legally correct. Without a correct form, any DUI investigation could be legally problematic.

“We are taking swift action today to ensure Kansas law enforcement immediately has available legally correct forms to comply with the law while continuing to keep our state’s streets and highways safe,” Schmidt said. “We are making the modified forms available immediately so DUI enforcement can continue uninterrupted.”

Schmidt said his office is issuing the temporary new forms in cooperation with the Department of Revenue, which is responsible for making permanent revisions to the form that was invalidated by today’s court rulings. The Supreme Court decisions are State v. Ryce, No. 111,698, State v. Nece, No. 111,401, State v. Wilson, No. 112,009 and State v. Wycoff, No. 110,393.

A copy of the law enforcement advisory and revised consent form from the attorney general’s office is available here.

RICE COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities in Rice County were able to make an arrest of a wanted felon on Wednesday.

The suspect was wanted on multiple felony warrants, according to a social media report.

Officers were in pursuit of the suspect when the vehicle rolled three times.

The suspect fled and had to be extracted from the woods and taken to a Game Warden’s truck and then transported to EMS.

He was arrested by the a Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks Game Warden, Rice and Barton County deputies, along with the use of K9 from Barton County.

Name of the suspect has not been released.

MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The government says Zika infections have been confirmed in nine pregnant women in the United States.

All got the virus overseas. Three babies have been born, one with a brain defect.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that it is also investigating 10 additional reports of pregnant travelers with Zika.

The Zika virus — spread mainly by mosquito bites — is epidemic in Latin America and the Caribbean. The virus causes mild illness or no symptoms in most people. But in Brazil, officials are investigating a possible link to babies born with brain defects and abnormally small heads.

Of the U.S. pregnancies, two ended in miscarriages and two in abortions. Two pregnancies are continuing without reported complications.