TOPEKA, KAN. – Three men who were arrested earlier this month in Saline County were indicted Wednesday on federal drug charges, according to U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom.

A grand jury in Topeka returned indictments against:

Adrian Ayala-Garcia, 23, a citizen of Mexico who has been living in Abilene, one count of possessing approximately 18 pounds of methamphetaminewith intent to distribute; one count of unlawful possession of firearms in furtherance of drug trafficking; and one count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

Eduardo Ponce-Serrano, 28, Salina, four counts of possession with intent to distribute cocaine, one count of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, one count of possession with intent to distribute 18 pounds of methamphetamine, and one count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

Francisco Javier Carrillo-Elias, 25, who is not a citizen of the United States and who has been living in Salina, three counts of possession withintent to distribute cocaine, one count of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, one count of possession with intent to distribute 18 pounds of methamphetamine, one count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

Upon conviction, the crimes carry the following penalties:

Possession with intent to distribute 18 pounds of methamphetamine: Not less than 10 years in federal prison and a fine up to $10 million.
Unlawful possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking: Not less than five years and a fine up to $250,000.
Possession with intent to distribute cocaine: A maximum penalty of 20 years and a fine up to $1 million.
Possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine: Not less than five years and not more than 40 years and a fine up to $5 million.
Conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine: Not less than 10 years and a fine up to $10 million.
The arrests were made after search warrants were executed on January 5th at three Salina homes and one home in Abilene. During the course of searches conducted at these homes, officer seized approximately 18 pounds of methamphetamine and numerous firearms. According to Saline County records, all three men are currently inmates of the Saline County Jail.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the Saline County Sheriff’s Office, the Salina Police Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigated. Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Hough is prosecuting.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A coroner says a woman whose body was found in a Kansas creek was strangled.

The body of 38-year-old Mary Ann Arnett was found in a creek south of Nickerson in June 2015.

The Hutchinson News reports Jamie Hatfield, of Hutchinson, is charged with premeditated first-degree murder, aggravated intimidation of a witness and conspiracy to commit murder in Arnett’s death. Her preliminary hearing is scheduled for next week.

Prosecutors say Hatfield and Jonathan Perser-Wilson were involved in Arnett’s death. Perser-Wilson was shot and killed by police during a confrontation the day after Arnett’s body was found.

Reno Capt. Steve Lutz of the Reno County Sheriff’s Office said Arnett and Hatfield had previously dated but when Arnett’s body was found, Hatfield was in a relationship with Wilson.

HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) — A Hutchinson man pleaded guilty to the shooting death of a Kansas State Fair worker.

Michael Brisco on Wednesday pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the September 2013 death of Sem Adrien of Chicago. Brisco was originally charged with alternate counts of first- and second-degree murder and four other charges.

Attorneys will recommend Brisco get a cumulative sentence of 15 years in prison.

Adrein went to Brisco’s home to get a haircut. Testimony at a preliminary hearing indicated Brisco became angry and a fight started inside the home but Adrein was shot outside the home. None of the people inside the home called police. A passerby who saw Adrein’s body alerted authorities.

HUTCHINSON -Two Kansas teens suspected of several automobile burglaries in the city of Nickerson were in court Wednesday for the formal reading of charges.

Kyle Nisbeth, 19, is now charged with 20 felony and misdemeanor counts, including several counts of auto-burglary, burglary of a non-dwelling, several counts of theft, including the theft of two firearms, one a shotgun and the other a rifle. He remains in jail on a bond of $57,500.

Quentin Zumalt, 19, is charged with eight counts of auto burglary and eight counts of misdemeanor theft.

Zumalt, who is free on bond, appeared with his attorney Stan Juhnke and they waived the reading of the charges.

During the investigation of these burglaries by the Patrol Division of the Reno County Sheriff’s Office a possible suspect vehicle was found in the driveway of a residence in Nickerson.
After talking to the residents the vehicle was seized as evidence, because there were items visible in the vehicle that appeared to be from the recent burglaries and the vehicle was identified as one of interest in other recent crimes in Reno County.

Ultimately 8 burglary reports were taken over $7200 worth of property was reported as stolen and some of that property has been recovered.
The cases against the two suspects will now moved to a future waiver-status docket next month.

PAOLA, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a former northeast Kansas dispatcher has been charged with felony possession of methamphetamine.

The Kansas City Star reports that Debbie Henson was a dispatch supervisor with the Miami County Sheriff’s Office until Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents arrested her this month. The sheriff’s office says she’s no longer employed by the agency. It wasn’t immediately known if she had an attorney.

Besides the drug charge, Henson faces one count each of possession of drug paraphernalia and official misconduct, both misdemeanors.

Henson was with the sheriff’s office for about 18 years.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three Powerball tickets will be splitting the record $1.6 billion jackpot. A California lottery official says winning tickets in last night’s drawing were sold in Tennessee, Florida and Chino Hills, California, near Los Angeles.

 

 

We have a winner in California! A jackpot-winning ticket was sold in Chino Hills. We’re still awaiting results from other states.

— California Lottery (@calottery) January 14, 2016

 

The frenzy over the largest Powerball jackpot in history paid off for the state of Kansas.

Kansas Lottery officials say sales for the Wednesday’s Powerball drawing were a record $9.68 million. The previous record was $6.77 million, set just last Saturday.

Lottery spokeswoman Sally Lunsford says the state recorded $5.31 million in sales in Kansas on Wednesday alone.

Three winning tickets were sold for Wednesday’s Powerball but none were in Kansas. However, two $1 million Powerball winning tickets were sold in the state, one in the southwest and one in south central Kansas.

The winning numbers were 4-8-19-27-34 and the Powerball was 10.

 

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A Wichita man has been sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison after being convicted of killing his longtime girlfriend.

The Wichita Eagle reports that Sedgwick County District Court Judge Warren Wilbert sentenced Darnell D. Hall Jr. to 190 months in prison Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last month. The judge also ordered the 23-year-old man to pay $5,000 in restitution.

Hall is convicted of shooting 23-year-old Sabryna Guerrero-Newman twice in the abdomen during an argument at a residence in January 2015. He then dragged her limp body to her car, which was later found several blocks north.

Several of Guerrero-Newman’s relatives said in court that they had forgiven Hall for the killing but thought he deserved the maximum prison sentence of 200 months.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — An audit of the Kansas Department for Children and Families won’t include an investigation into whether the agency discriminates against same-sex couple.

The Wichita Eagle reports that the Legislative Post Audit Committee deadlocked on the proposed anti-gay discrimination investigation and eventually decided to delay the issue until its April meeting. The audit the panel approved Wednesday will focus on safety and privatization.

Sen. Michael O’Donnell, a Wichita Republican, says the audit will be the “most comprehensive” of the foster care system in the state’s history.

But Rep. Jim Ward called the decision “simply unbelievable.” The Wichita Democrat had proposed an audit of discrimination claims after several couples came forward in recent months. He accused lawmakers of voting to “cover up evidence of discrimination in a major state agency.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Chipotle says it will start a marketing push in February to begin its road to recovery after a series of food scares, and that it’s confident it can win back customers over time.

The remarks from executives come after Chipotle’s sales plunged 30 percent in December. Its troubles began after an E. coli outbreak came to light at the end of October. Several weeks later, norovirus sickened dozens at a Chipotle in Boston.

Health regulators say one person who ate at a Chipotle restaurant in Kansas also became ill in a late November E. coli outbreak that sickened five people in three states.

Kansas Department of Health and Environment spokeswoman Sara Belfry said the person ate at Chiptole’s Shawnee Mission Parkway location the week of Nov. 23. No other details were released.

Last week, Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. said it was subpoenaed by federal authorities as part of a criminal investigation tied to a different norovirus outbreak in California over the summer.

At an investment conference in Florida, Chipotle executives said Wednesday the Denver company is taking measures to reduce the risk of another food scare to “near zero.”

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — The University of Kansas has chosen a University of Iowa woman as the program director for its new Sexual Assault Prevention & Education Center.

The university announced Wednesday that Jennifer Brockman will start her new job Jan. 20. Brockman currently is executive director of the University of Iowa’s Rape Victim Advocacy Program, which serves 250,000 people in eight counties. She coordinated primary sexual assault prevention and education for four institutions of higher education and many secondary schools.

Kansas’ new center will coordinate the university’s sexual assault prevention and education programming. It also will assess those efforts and create new programming. Brockman is the center’s first employee.

The center is one of several changes recommended by the Chancellor’s Task Force on Sexual Assault, which submitted its final report in May 2015.

By JIM MCLEAN

Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback didn’t specifically mention Medicaid expansion in his State of the State speech Tuesday night to a joint session of the Legislature.

Still, he made it clear that he remains opposed to expanding eligibility to cover more than 150,000 low-income adults, many of whom are uninsured.

Seeming to acknowledge that the closure of Mercy Hospital in the southeast Kansas community of Independence had increased interest in expansion, Brownback said “Obamacare” was the main reason for the hospital’s financial struggles and those of other rural providers.

“It was Obamacare that cut Medicare reimbursements to rural hospitals,” Brownback said, referring to the Affordable Care Act.

“It was Obamacare that caused the problem. We should not expand Obamacare to solve the problem.”

Nationally, hospitals supported the ACA and the Medicare reimbursement reductions it included because they expected that increasing the number of Americans with private insurance and expanding Medicaid would more than offset those reductions. Kansas’ rejection of expansion has denied hospitals and other health care providers in the state much of that offsetting revenue.

Not expanding Medicaid has cost Kansas providers $920 million and counting, according to the Kansas Hospital Association, which keeps a running total of the cost on its website. Insisting that expansion isn’t the solution to the struggles of rural providers, Brownback said he’s open to other proposals. He announced the creation of a working group to “address the problems of health care delivery in rural Kansas.”

Brownback named Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, a plastic surgeon and the primary architect of KanCare, the state’s privatized Medicaid program, to lead the group in crafting a plan for his consideration “by this time next year.”

“I believe this working group should have frontline stakeholders involved, including a rural hospital administrator and a rural physician, at the same time as top policymakers,” Brownback said.

Brownback said the working group would welcome input from “diverse organizations.” But he said it would be unrealistic to rely on “yet another false Obamacare promise.”

“We can and should find a Kansas solution that will improve rural health care access and outcomes,” he said.

Kansas is one of 19 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid eligibility.

Shortly before the governor’s speech, the hospital association distributed an editorial to Kansas media written by Terry Deschaine, a former hospital CEO and current member of the board of trustees at Sumner Regional Medical Center in Wellington.

Deschaine countered the governor’s arguments against expansion, saying it would “inject some much-needed cash into rural hospitals like Wellington’s.

“As a former hospital administrator and current hospital board member, I implore our state leaders and lawmakers to expand KanCare,” Deschaine wrote.

“While not a silver bullet, expanding KanCare is an important part of preserving access to hospital care across Kansas — and particularly in rural communities like Wellington.”

A recent report commissioned by the Sunflower Foundation said that Medicaid expansion would lower state spending in several areas by enough to cover the annual $53 million cost of expansion, perhaps with money to spare.

The hospital association is working on an expansion bill modeled on so-called red-state plans adopted in other states headed by Republican governors. Association officials say they hope to have the bill introduced by next week.

Jim McLean is executive editor of KHI News Service in Topeka, a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor team.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A new report shows U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran has amassed more than $3.1 million in cash for his re-election effort as 2016 kicks off. The Kansas Republican is running unopposed so far.

His campaign reported on Wednesday it raised about $750, 600 during the fourth quarter last year, with nearly $280,000 of contributions coming from political committees. It spent more than $322,000.

The campaign listed the transactions in a finance report, covering the period from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, 2015.

For this time in the election cycle, the campaign contends it has the largest cash-on-hand balance of any incumbent U.S. senator for Kansas in recent history.

Deputy Campaign Manager Elizabeth Patton says in an email that the support is indicative that Kansans know and trust Moran puts Kansas first.

HUTCHINSON – A man suspected of setting a pair of fires on in May of 2014 was before a Reno County judge Wednesday for the reading of two charges against him.

Dustin Gordon, 26, is charged with two counts of arson for allegedly setting fire to a two story home and also a trailer that was used for storage.

He was transferred to the Reno County jail from Saline County this week after he was convicted and sentenced in October in three cases of arson in that county.

The fires were occurred on East Blanchard south of the intersection of Kansas 61 and U.S. 50, on the southeast side of Hutchinson.

When fire crews arrived, they found a fully involved two story house and also a second fire in a mobile home 1/8 mile east of the house that was fully involved as well. Both houses were vacant and had been for some time.

In Saline County, Gordon was convicted for two counts of aggravated arson and one count of arson and is currently serving time on those three charges.