HUTCHINSON— Reno County District Judge Trish Rose granted a defense motion on Friday for a gag order in the trial of a Hutchinson man charge with first-degree murder.

Brennan Trass, 31, is accused in the shooting death of 24-year-old Jose Morales.

Morales was found on the floor of a residence on Aug. 17 with multiple gunshot wounds. He died later at Hutchinson Regional Medical Center.

The defense for Trass argued that some reporting in the media, in particular stories in the local newspaper, were both negative and inaccurate and is prejudicial to her client.

Sarah McKinnon wanted the gag order in place to keep attorneys for the state from talking with the media about the facts of the case.

The defense also wanted discovery items from the state, which they say they have not yet received.

These include copies of a 911 call on the day of the shooting and copies of data obtained from any cell phones, which were seized in the case.

They also want any evidence, material or information that would tend to impeach the credibility of any person who the state intends to call as a witness.

The judge granted the defense request on those items, but denied a defense request that the state should provide records of drug or alcohol use of witnesses.

The judge also set a deadline of Feb. 29 for the state to provide those discovery items, however Deputy District Attorney Tom Stanton noted that in cases like this, the investigation is on going and that there may be evidence uncovered that comes after that deadline. He says if that happens, they will turn everything over to the defense.

The trial is scheduled for March 22.

Listen as ‘Voice of the Chiefs’ Mitch Holthus takes a look back at the Chiefs first playoff win in 22 years last Saturday in Houston then previews this afternoon’s AFC Divisional game in Foxboro against defending Super Bowl champion New England.

The Holthus Hotline airs Saturday at 6:30 a.m. during the Chiefs season.

DAVID PITT, Associated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Even a jackpot isn’t enough to buy anonymity for many lottery winners, whose names are often made public by state law.

But now it’s becoming increasingly possible for big winners including those in Kansas, to hide their identity.

Lottery executives are trying to strike a balance between ensuring privacy and safety while still proving to the public that real people can win.

Andrew Stoltmann is an Illinois attorney who has represented winners. He says forcing people to reveal their names is like “throwing meat into a shark-infested ocean.”

On the other hand, gambling experts and others say, allowing winners to collect jackpots in secret invites public suspicion and makes it easier for cheating to go undetected.

By ALEX SMITH

For expectant parents like Melissa and Michael Funaro, the prospect of a new baby evokes a host of emotions.

“You have this thing inside of you growing, and him and I created it,” Melissa says. “So it’s like, what’s he gonna look like?”

For future mother Karina Rivera, pregnancy is exhilarating.

“Everything’s exciting,” she says. “Just buying baby clothes, buying diapers. Looking at the diapers, and they’re so tiny.”

Jamie and Laura McCamish say the wait for their baby is almost too much to bear.

“I think right now we’re just to the point where we want to hold her and smell her,” Laura says.

Thanks to advances in prenatal and neonatal care, the overwhelming majority of infants are born healthy and thrive.

But sometimes things don’t go as planned.

In Johnson County, for every 1,000 infants born in recent years, fewer than five don’t make it to their first birthday. In Wyandotte County, the number is closer to eight.

For African Americans in both counties, the numbers are even higher. In fact, for the last few years Kansas’s black infant mortality rate has been the highest in the country.

Knocking on doors

To improve these dismal figures, some community health groups are going beyond splashy health campaigns. They’re knocking on doors. Like those of 21 -year-old Tanesha Horton, who found out she was pregnant last March.

“It was an experience,” she says. “I was scared. I was happy. But I was kind of scared.”

Horton, who’s African-American, lives in a Kansas City, Kansas, ZIP code that has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the state.

She enrolled in Healthy Families Wyandotte, a program that offers in-home support for first-time parents in Wyandotte County. With the agency’s help, she got prenatal care, including vitamins, regular doctor’s visits and her first sonogram, which she gleefully recalls.

“Yeah, that was the most exciting part: hearing his heartbeat,” Horton says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s really a baby in there!’”

But the sonograms also showed something unusual in her developing son’s kidneys. Her doctors said they wouldn’t be able to tell exactly what it was until he was born.

Horton was haunted by worry.

“Is he going to have two kidneys that’s connected?” she says. “Is he going to have three? What are they going to see?”

A puzzle

The high infant mortality rate among African-Americans troubles and puzzles health experts. In Kansas, the rate is about two and half times that of non-Hispanic whites and about twice that of Latinos.

And it’s not just in lower-income places like Wyandotte County. The infant mortality gap is just as wide in Johnson County.

The causes are many and varied: the mother’s health, genetic conditions, sudden infant death syndrome, domestic abuse, smoking, drug and alcohol use.

And while some infant mortality differences can be attributed to behaviors or education levels, a lot of them can’t. The puzzle forces experts take a much wider look for causes.

“The outcome of a pregnancy is not just determined the nine months that a woman is pregnant. We really have to be mindful of the fact that a woman brings into her pregnancy the sum total of her life experiences,” says Tyan Parker Dominguez, a clinical associate professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work whose work focuses on disparities in infant mortality.

Some experts think African-American women might be genetically predisposed to high infant mortality, but Dominguez and other researchers aren’t so sure.

They point to U.S. immigrants from Africa with similar genetic profiles but infant mortality rates similar to those of white American women.

Dominguez and others say another factor may be at work: racism.

“As events have shown us over history and certainly in more recent history, we see that there are still deep racial divisions in this country, and they can be a great source of stress,” Dominguez says.

Acute stress by itself doesn’t necessarily affect pregnancy, but over a lifetime it can contribute to conditions like heart disease and obesity, which can affect infant mortality.

“It’s sort of the biological manifestation of race relations in this country, seeing this systematic, over time, oppression of communities of color, particularly – in the United States – the African American community,” Dominguez says.

Signs of hope

Whether the problem of infant mortality is biological or societal, it’s probably beyond the reach of community health groups like Healthy Families Wyandotte, which instead are taking on the issue one infant at a time.

While data show a slow but steady decline in infant mortality across racial and ethnic groups in Kansas, the gap between blacks and whites remains the same as it was a generation ago.

In November, Tanesha’s son D’won was born with two kidneys that were somewhat lower than where kidneys are usually found.

Though D’won appears to be healthy, doctors are still monitoring his kidneys. His mother admits she still worries and sits up for hours watching him sleep.

“It be in the back of my mind,” Horton says. “But it’s like, I tell myself, like, he’s gonna be OK. He’s gonna be OK.”

This article was produced as a project for the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism and the National Health Journalism Fellowship, programs of USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism.

Alex Smith is  reporter with the Heartland Health Monitor team. You can reach him on Twitter @AlexSmithKCUR

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Kansas City woman whose daughter was 10 years old and weighed just 32 pounds when she was rescued from a closet has been sentenced to 34 years in prison.

The Kansas City Star reports that the mother screamed after she was sentenced Friday for endangering, abusing and assaulting the girl. Police officers found the girl barricaded in an apartment closet in June 2012 while responding to a child abuse hotline call.

The Associated Press isn’t naming the mother to protect the child’s identity.

Prosecutors said the girl didn’t attend school or receive adequate medical care. They argued the abuse left her so weak that she had a heart transplant in 2013. Defense witnesses said her heart disease could have had “a vast number of causes.”

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas lawmakers will consider next week legislation that would allow changes in the petition process that allows citizens to convene grand juries in cases where they believe prosecutors are not pursuing wrongdoing.

The proposed bill now would allow the person who seeks to call a grand jury to observe when the presiding judge instructs the grand jurors.

The final committee vote is scheduled for Tuesday, when approval would send the measure to the Senate.

Kansas is one of six states that allows citizens to petition for grand juries.

The 1887 law was rarely used until abortion opponents discovered it about a decade ago it to force grand jury investigations of abortion clinics. It has also been used by activists to also go after stores they contend sell pornography.

KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A man and a woman have died in a fiery crash in Kansas City, Kansas.

Police said in a news release that the crash happened early Friday. The release says that the preliminary investigation indicates that the victims were in a speeding vehicle that left the roadway, hit a tree stump and caught on fire.

The man was in his mid-60s and the woman in her late 40s. Their names weren’t immediately released, pending positive identification and notification of family members.

The crash is under investigation.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Federal officials say a bird flu virus that is different from the one that ravaged turkey and chicken farms last summer has been found in Indiana.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Friday the H7N8 flu strain had been confirmed at a commercial turkey farm in the southwestern Indiana county of Dubois. The strain is highly contagious for birds, not humans.

Last year’s H5N2 virus outbreak began spreading widely in the spring, not winter, and led to the deaths of 48 million birds.

Indiana Board of Animal Health spokeswoman Denise Derrer says the farm has about 60,000 turkeys and the flock is being euthanized to prevent the disease from spreading.

She said a quarantine is in place for commercial poultry farms and backyard flocks within a nearly 6-mile radius.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A Roman Catholic bishop who was convicted in Missouri of not reporting suspected child abuse has become chaplain at a convent in Nebraska.

Bishop Emeritus Robert Finn is spiritual adviser to the nuns at the School Sisters of Christ the King convent in Lincoln.

Finn was found guilty in 2012 of one misdemeanor count of failure to report suspected abuse and was given two years’ probation, making him the highest-ranking church official in the U.S. to be convicted of taking no action over abuse allegations.

Lincoln Diocese spokesman J.D. Flynn said Friday the 62-year-old Finn resigned as bishop for the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese in Missouri but retains the religious title of bishop emeritus.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that Finn succeeds Monsignor Myron Pleskac, who died Jan. 2.

FINNEY COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities in Finney County are investigating a 4-vehicle injury accident.

Just before 10p.m. on Thursday, officers of the Garden City Police Department conducted a traffic stop on a 2002 Dodge Ram that was being driven damaged and on a flat tire by Juan Calderon-Dominguez, 47, Garden City, according to a media release.

Calderon- Dominguez advised he was driving to the hospital because he was just involved in an accident in the 1600 block of Bancroft.

Officers responded to the area and located the accident scene.

The investigation revealed Caldron-Dominguez attempted to park his Ram truck in the 1600 block of Bancroft.

He exited the vehicle while leaving it in gear and the vehicle began to roll forward striking a white 2006 Chevy Cobalt that was parked unoccupied.

The truck continues to roll forward while Calderon-Dominguez ran after it.

He attempted to re-enter the vehicle but was unsuccessful and the rear tire of the truck ran over him.

Caldron-Dominguez sustained injuries to his leg.

The truck jumped the curb and struck a Grey 1995 Chevy S10 truck that was parked unoccupied.

When the S10 was struck it collided with a Blue 1994 Mercury Topaz that was parked unoccupied.

The Red Dodge Ram then struck a fence where it came to rest after being lodged in the fence.

Finney County EMS responded to the scene. Juan Calderon-Dominguez was transported to St Catherine Hospital by a third party.