SHAWNEE COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities are investigating a Kansas felon on new charges after a traffic stop.
Anderson photo Shawnee Co.
On Friday, a police officer observed Dominique Anderson 27 of Topeka leaving the Law Enforcement Center, according to Lt. Aaron Jones.
The officer recognized Anderson and knew he was wanted for a felony criminal damage domestic case which occurred January 20.
Anderson left the property in a vehicle which was stopped at 4th and SW Jackson in Topeka. Police took him into custody without incident.
A search of the vehicle revealed a small amount of marijuana, other suspected narcotics, drug paraphernalia and a stolen Taurus 9mm handgun. Anderson has at least one prior felony conviction leading to a charge of Criminal Use of a Firearm, according to Jones.
He was transported to the Shawnee County Department of Corrections under suspicion of felony Criminal Damage (Domestic), Criminal use of a Firearm, and narcotic related charges.
This is the 6th case in 2019 with a charge involving a felon in possession of a firearm reported by the Topeka Police Department.
ALLEN COUNTY — Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver De’Anthony Thomas is out on bail after a weekend arrest, according to a report by the Allen County Sheriff’s Department.
Thomas -photo Allen Co. Sheriff
De’Anthony M. Thomas, 26, Lee’s Summit, Missouri, was booked Saturday into the Allen County Jail on suspicion of Possession of Marijuana and Possession of Drug Paraphernalia.
He was no longer in custody Sunday, according to online jail records.
The Chiefs selected Thomas from the University of Oregon in the 2014 NFL Draft. He played in five games in the 2018-19 season before a leg injury in practice ended his season.
The Chiefs had not released a statement on the arrest late Sunday afternoon.
LAWRENCE — Most people vastly overestimate the population of gun owners in the United States, and it potentially influences how groups approach gun policies, according to a study by two University of Kansas political scientists.
“Because gun owners are actually a minority, perceiving their group as larger and even as a majority could make them feel more empowered to advocate on gun issues,” said Don Haider-Markel, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science. “Likewise, non-gun owners that perceive a larger gun owner population now and in the future might be less likely to advocate for gun regulations.”
Mark Joslyn
Mark Joslyn, professor of political science, and Haider-Markel are co-authors of the study, recently published in the journal Politics & Policy. They examined results from a 2016 nationally representative survey of 1,290 American adults who answered questions on a variety of policy, election-specific, psychological and political questions, including a number on gun ownership and regulation.
Specifically, the survey asked people to give their “best guess” on what percentage of Americans owned firearms. The actual percentage of U.S. individual gun owners is roughly 25 percent, and about 33-40 percent of U.S. households have at least one gun in the home, the researchers said.
However, the researchers found that more than 75 percent of respondents overestimated the number, and only a small minority, 2.3 percent, underestimated the number of gun owners.
The most common estimate was 50 percent, and nearly one-fifth of respondents estimated the gun owner population was 70 percent or higher.
“Generally speaking, less knowledgeable people tend to overestimate the size of groups, but so, too, do people who belong to the group, have contact with the group or have positive affinity towards the group,” Haider-Markel said. “In short, we inflate the size of groups we belong to or are close to.”
The overestimation of the population among both gun owners and non-gun owners could provide some explanation for the level of support surrounding pro-gun policies or the lack of support for federal gun control measures, even in wake of high-profile mass shootings, such as Newtown, Connecticut; Las Vegas; and Orlando and Parkland, Florida, though the professors said future research would likely examine potential trends after more recent advocacy efforts by gun violence victims.
“We see this as another in a line of politicized issues where facts are contested and factual beliefs might influence policy attitudes on the issue. As such, we wanted to explore basic knowledge about gun owners, perceptions of future gun ownership, and determine whether these perceptions influenced gun attitudes,” Haider-Markel said.
He added that past research in this area is built around the notion of a perceived threat of a group, but rarely is that threat actually assessed.
The researchers have conducted similar research on how people overestimate the gay population in the United States.
“As with the earlier study, people are not very good at estimating the size of groups, and this has implications for their policy preferences,” Haider-Markel said. “Here we can also show that people tend to think that the gun owner population will grow in the future even though all indications are that the gun owner population is getting smaller.”
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Some lawmakers are pushing legislation that could end a long-running economic borderwar between Missouri and Kansas that has prompted both states to spend millions of dollars in the last decade to lure businesses in the Kansas City metropolitan region across the state line.
Kansas spent $184 million in incentives since 2010 to entice businesses to move, while Missouri spent about $151 million in the same time period, according to the Hall Family Foundation. Those millions resulted in a net of about 1,200 jobs in Kansas.
“We’re using (economic development incentives) to divide the pie, not increase the pie,” said Bill Hall, president of the foundation and a Kansas City metro area civic leader.
Missouri passed a law in 2014 that prohibited the use of state incentives to poach businesses in Douglas, Johnson, Miami and Wyandotte counties. But the law required Kansas to pass a similar bill pledging not to go after businesses in Clay, Cass, Jackson and Platte counties in Missouri, The Kansas City Star reported.
Kansas lawmakers and then-Republican Gov. Sam Brownback rejected the plan. Brownback suggested a similar proposal two years later but it ultimately failed.
Missouri’s bill expired in 2016. Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Republican from Lee’s Summit, has filed a bill this session that would renew the legislation through 2021 to provide a chance for further discussion.
“I don’t understand why reasonable people can’t sit down and figure this out,” Cierpiot said. “It’s just bad policy.”
Critics of the tax incentives say companies get millions of dollars in tax breaks to move a few miles and often add only a few new jobs.
For example, Kansas spent $3 million in tax breaks to move about 60 jobs at HCA Midwest Health four miles from Kansas City, Missouri, to Overland Park, Kansas.
New Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said in a statement that everyone agrees the current situation doesn’t make sense “but the devil is in the details.”
“We will be looking at this issue and reviewing the legislation to determine if it is in the best interest of Kansas,” she said.
Some Kansas City metro area question the need for legislation, saying the economic realities are different than they were in 2014.
Blake Schreck, president of the Lenexa Chamber of Commerce, questioned how urgent the problem is now because the economy is healthy and both sides of the state line are flourishing.
“We’re all growing and doing fine, so it hasn’t been a huge issue,” he said.
But he said getting a bi-state agreement to award incentives only for net new jobs would help both sides.
“I would anticipate we’ll take a crack at it sometime this year,” he said.
Bill Hall, who has spent years advocating for a cease-fire in the incentives border war, said now is a good time to get an agreement because of the strong economy.
“The economy is not always going to stay good,” Hall said. “This is the perfect time to deal with it because emotions aren’t as high and more reason can be brought to it, because people aren’t fighting for every last job.”
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A county sheriff is warning parents in the Wichita area about illegal vape cartridges that are packaged with cartoons and contain high levels of THC, the compound that gives marijuana its high.
Image courtesy Sedgwick Co. Sheriff
Sedgwick County deputies recently seized THC-infused vape cartridges intended for medical marijuana use, which were smuggled into the state from California, according to Sheriff Jeff Easter. The cartridges contain 80-90 percent THC, which is more than most marijuana products seized by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.
Kansas law prohibits possessing or distributing THC vape products. It’s also illegal for anyone under 18 to sell, buy or possess any type of electronic cigarette.
The vapes found in the Wichita area may cause symptoms of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome , such as nausea and vomiting, Easter said. It’s unclear whether any children have been affected by the product.
The county sheriff said police are concerned that children are being targeted because the colorful packaging is decorated with cartoon characters, such as Looney Tunes’ Pepe Le Pew and Disney’s Goofy.
The vape flavoring masks the odor of marijuana, which could make it difficult for parents to identify the smell, Easter said.
Sheriff Easter is giving a press conference on THC filled vape cartridges seized in Sedgwick Count https://t.co/jHKi63o3gJ
“I guarantee you there’s kids that have been bringing this home or people bringing it home living with their parents and grandparents and they have no idea what it is,” he said.
The sheriff directed parents to call 911 if they find their kids in possession of the products.
Most Kansas students graduate high school nowadays. Yet many still struggle with the skills of reading and writing.
Now a task force of educators, parents and lawmakers hopes to help close that gap.
A student with dyslexia gets specialized tutoring at Pittsburg State University’s Center for READing. FILE PHOTO / KANSAS NEWS SERVICE
Over the past half year, the Dyslexia Task Force put together recommendations and this month handed them off to the Kansas State Board of Education.
The group’s work is well worth paying attention to. It could change reading instruction for every public school student in the state.
The goal? Catching a wide range of struggling readers and spellers earlier on.
Signs of dyslexia according to research at Yale University
It extends far beyond dyslexia — though even that, some researchers say, is far more common than parents and teachers realized in the past.
Ugh, English is hard.
Though, bough, cough, tough.
You’ve probably reflected on the woes of English spelling before. Usually we just throw up our hands. Or shrug. Or jokingly congratulate ourselves on having the strangest writing system in the world, then move on.
That’s not acceptable to teachers who specialize in instruction for children with dyslexia.
Unbeknownst to many of us, much of the “weirdness” does follow patterns. (English professor Anne Curzan has this enjoyable column to that point.)
Angie Schreiber began learning these nitty-gritty guidelines after finding out her son had dyslexia. Now she runs an Emporia private school that teaches students like him.
“English is 80 to 85 percent regular,” she argues. “If we teach to the regularity and not use the irregularities as an excuse, we can teach our kids to read, write and spell.”
A couple examples:
Check out the “ie” words in the photo below. Shield, tie, brief, die, and so on.
This is a photo of a teacher’s laptop while her eighth-grade student with dyslexia practiced reading them aloud. It helped him to recall that “ie” often sounds like an “i” at the end of a word, but like an “e” if it’s in the middle.
And what about spelling “back”? What’s that “c” doing before the “k”? Schreiber explains that English usually uses “ck” at the end of a one-syllable word after a short vowel. Hence “back” and “truck” get a “ck” that “bank” and “think” don’t.
Solution to the big ole reading gap?
Teaching such guidelines are one part of “structured literacy,” an approach to reading instruction that may soon be required of every elementary school in Kansas.
Some people swear by it. Others roll their eyes.
The disagreement is part of “the reading wars” — a decades-long and nationwide rift in the sphere of literacy education.
How can there be so much to debate about teaching kids to read? Well, because so many people worry we still haven’t figured it out.
Even the optimism around No Child Left Behind waxed and waned. Nearly two decades later, Americans continue to enter adulthood without mastering this vital skill.
Though almost 90 percent of Kansas students graduate high school, a third of the state’s high-schoolers score below grade level on English tests. More than two-thirds test below the higher proficiency bar that Kansas uses for federal accountability.
Structured literacy teachers argue they know how to resolve a big chunk of that reading gap.
They’re not saying all those children have dyslexia — they’re saying research shows structured literacy improves reading and spelling across the board.
Did you miss the Kansas News Service’s feature on dyslexia?
Plenty of literacy specialists disagree (hence the “reading wars”). Sometimes, experts on either side even cite the same research as showing totally different things.
Rethinking classrooms and college
So, back to the dyslexia task force’s decision this month.
Pending approval from the Kansas State Board of Education, the group wants to make structured literacy part of the college coursework required to teach in this state. To get their licenses, many teachers would need to pass a test that shows they understand and can teach in depth things like “phonemic awareness” — which involves recognizing and breaking down individual sounds in words.
Schools would need to offer training for teachers already in the field and incorporate structured literacy into general reading instruction for all students.
Read a draft of the task force’s recommendations.
Reports from state-appointed panels don’t always lead anywhere. Some end up looking more like political theater than anything else. Don’t expect that fate for this one.
“This, obviously, is not going to be one of those reports that sits on a shelf someplace,” said retired superintendent Jim Porter. “It’s going to get the attention it deserves.”
Porter chaired the task force and, until recently, the state board.
Adopting structured literacy would add Kansas to a national wave of states passing laws and policies meant to better serve children with dyslexia.
Even among those states, though, a radio documentary by APM Reports suggests implementation has proven tricky.
The state board of education may vote on the task force’s recommendations in the coming weeks or months. Rolling out new standards in thousands of schools and training a critical mass of teachers will take longer.
“I’m worried that it’s going to be a 10-year process,” says Christina Middleton, a Lenexa mother whose son wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia till the summer before fifth grade.
That’s when she took him to Children’s Mercy Hospital for tests, got a diagnosis and signed him up for private instruction in structured literacy.
Half a dozen reading programs had failed him before that point, she says. Now in high school, he reads at grade level.
Teaching schools wanted a seat at the table
Colleges of education may well ask the state board to rein in some of the recommendations. They worry Kansas is on the brink of sweeping changes that bypassed them.
The sole professor on the dyslexia task force was psychologist David Hurford, who founded a center focused on researching dyslexia and teaching children who struggle with reading.
The dyslexia task force membership
“There is a voice missing,” Ken Weaver, dean of the Emporia State Teachers College, wrote in an email this week. “That is the literacy faculty from all the Regents universities.”
Those professors likely would have expressed concern that task force members were misunderstanding the thrust of decades of research on reading education. Or underestimating the extent of phonics and related instruction already taking place in Kansas schools.
But from the point of view of parents who say schools failed their children year after year, the status quo just hasn’t been working.
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @Celia_LJ.
LAWRENCE – It will take many weapons to fight the epidemic of opioid addiction, but one medication critical to fighting the worst drug crisis in U.S. history remains woefully underprescribed and underutilized, according to research from the University of Kansas Medical Center.
The number of Americans with an opioid addiction has more than doubled in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, drug overdoses have become the leading cause death in the United States for people under 50 years of age and the overall leading cause of death by injury (overdoses are categorized as unintentional injuries by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
Yet there remains a huge gap in the number of prescriptions for buprenorphine, a medication effective in treating opioid addiction, and the skyrocketing number of people who have that addiction, according to research led by Andrew Roberts, Pharm.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Kansas School of Medicine.
First approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2002 to treat opioid use disorder, buprenorphine is a partial opioid itself. Also known by its brand name, Suboxone, buprenorphine reduces cravings and relieves withdrawal symptoms but does not produce a high at typical doses. People in recovery from addiction can take buprenorphine to stay physically comfortable while stopping their abuse of riskier prescriptions such as oxycodone or street opioids such as heroin.
Watch the video below of Dr. Roberts and Roopa Sethi, M.D., of the KU addictions clinic discussing buprenorphine barriers and treatment.
Methadone, the better known, older opioid replacement therapy, does the same thing, but is often harder for people to access: in the United States, methadone must be administered to the patient at a clinic certified by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; the methadone clinic system was developed in the 1960s and then carved into law in the Narcotic Addict Treatment Act in 1974. But patients can take buprenorphine at home on a schedule, as they would for any other chronic condition. “It can be prescribed by any physician trained to prescribe it, and you just pick it up at the pharmacy,” said Roberts. “It’s much easier for people to obtain.”
There’s the irony. Of the more than 2 million Americans with opioid addiction, just one in five obtain any treatment. Studies show that the most effective therapy for opioid addiction is medication-assisted treatment: behavioral therapy combined with a medication such as buprenorphine or methadone. In 2016, the same year that more Americans-more than 40,000-died from opioid overdoses than from car accidents, Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act to increase treatment access. One provision of the law is an increase the number of people for whom a doctor can prescribe buprenorphine, from 100 to 275 patients per year. Expanding access to the drug has become a major federal priority.
Meanwhile, Roberts and his colleagues were thinking ahead. “Assuming that the provider supply issue could be addressed, we were wondering what other barriers there might be to getting and adhering to treatment.”
They immediately thought of cost, a known treatment barrier with other chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes. When the price of a medication for those diseases goes up, the less likely people are to take it and the worse their clinical outcomes are.
Roberts also points to the risk of price gouging. The obvious headline-making example is the price of the EpiPen-the life-saving injection device used by millions of Americans to treat lethal allergic reactions-which rose 500 percent over a decade. There’s already some evidence of price gouging happening in the opioid treatment arena. The cost of a twin-pack of injector device to administer naloxone, a drug that can reverse an opioid overdose, has risen to $4,500 in 2018, from $690 in 2014. “We wanted to see if we needed to be worried about the cost of buprenorphine as we try to connect people with treatment,” Roberts said.
Working with researchers from Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins, Roberts analyzed outpatient prescription claims data from 2003 to 2015, looking at buprenorphine utilization and expenditures for both health plans and insured patients. The database captured 20 million people annually during those years who were in a commercial health insurance plan provided by a large or medium-sized U.S. employer. They wanted to look at privately insured people in particular because these people are more likely to be affected by higher out-of-pocket prescription costs than are Medicare and Medicaid patients.
What they found, Roberts calls a “pleasant surprise”: the median amount paid by private payers (health plans) for a 30-day supply of buprenorphine has remained relatively stable since 2003, and the out-of-pocket median expenditure for privately insured adults has actually steadily decreased over time, from $67 to $32 for a 30-day prescription. Buprenorphine appears to be insulated from the large spending increases that have affected life-saving drugs for other chronic diseases.
But they also saw something worrisome in the data. The number of people taking buprenorphine for treatment increased until 2013, but then the number of people initiating treatment declined from 2013 through 2015. “This is in the face of a massive treatment gap,” said Roberts. “We would have hoped to have seen an exponential increase in the number of people starting treatment-we know they are out there.”
If cost isn’t the barrier to buprenorphine being more widely used, then the question becomes, what is?
One issue, Roberts said, is that although it’s less complicated than methadone, prescribing buprenorphine is more regulated than for other medications. Physicians must take a short training course to get permission to prescribe it. “So there’s that hoop to jump through, and sometimes physicians are leery into wading into that territory [of addiction] clinically. There’s a fear it might invite scrutiny from authorities,” he said. “And then there’s the whole stigma around addiction.”
Brendan Saloner, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a co-author on the study, also cites stigma as a barrier. “Many patients and doctors still harbor antiquated ideas about how addiction medication works, and there is a pervasive and untrue myth that medication substitutes one form of addiction for another,” he said.
Roberts notes that their data go only through 2015, and the jury is still out on how much of a difference the 2016 regulations, including increasing the number of people doctors can treat with buprenorphine, will make. “But according to our data, the uphill battle to close these treatment gaps is getting providers to participate in this fight,” said Roberts. “And one of the easiest ways to fight it is to get trained and treat patients with this drug.”
INDEPENDENCE, Mo. (AP) — A woman who was raped in front of her 2-year-old daughter several months before prosecutors say her two assailants abducted and sexually assaulted a Kansas sheriff’s deputy says police seemed to doubt her when she sought their help.
Luth and Newman-Caddell
During a hearing Thursday in which one of the men, 41-year-old William Luth, pleaded guilty to raping her, the Independence, Missouri, woman told the court that the officers who investigated the February 2016 attack in her home “made it abundantly clear that they were pretty sure I was just being dramatic.”
No suspects were identified in that attack until Luth and Brady Newman-Caddell were arrested for the October 2016 sexual assault of the Johnson County, Kansas, sheriff’s deputy and authorities say DNA evidence linked them to the earlier attack.
The Missouri woman said from the outset, the Independence police seemed to doubt her story that she was raped in the same bed as her toddler. She said they asked her about her past sexual partners and pored over her social media history and phone contacts.
“They made me feel insane,” she told the court.
She also said it made her sick when she found out that Luth had raped another woman. “I owed this woman so much gratitude for being strong enough to endure what they had done, and to have the courage to seek justice,” she said. “Without her, I wouldn’t be here facing William Luth today.”
She said her case was solved because she underwent a rape examination and “forensic scientists did their job,” and that she hasn’t received an apology or acknowledgement from the police department even though her account was proven true. She said at least with Luth, she gets an admission of guilt, which she described as proof that “I was telling the truth.”
Officer John Syme, an Independence police spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to an Associated Press phone message Friday seeking comment.
Both Luth and Newman-Caddell pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping the deputy, with Luth getting sentenced to 41 years in prison in that case and 30 years for the Missouri attack, to be served at the same time.
Newman-Caddell was scheduled to be sentenced Wednesdayin attack on the deputy, but the hearing was called off when he told the judge he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea. The charges against him in the Missouri attack are still pending.
The Star and the AP don’t generally identify victims of sex crimes.
SALINE COUNTY — A pair of small earthquakes shook portions of central-Kansas Saturday.
The first quake just after midnight measured a magnitude 2.8 and was centered approximately four miles east of Salina, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A 2.7 quake was also reported in the same area just before 10:30p.m.
These quakes follows a 3.8 magnitude quake Friday afternoon in Sumner County. And a series of five quakes ranging from a magnitude 2.5 – 4.5 in Sumner County since January 16 according to the USGS.
There are no reports of damage or injury from Saturday’s quakes. Saline County dispatch said they received no calls on the quake.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The first new KC-46 air refueling tankers have arrived at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita.
Two of the tankers landed at the base Friday afternoon.
The tanker uses the Boeing 767 passenger airplane as its airframe, and McConnell is the first base to receive the next-generation tanker. Boeing has said McConnell is slated to receive two more of the aircraft next week.
The long-awaited tankers replace KC-135 air refueling tankers used by McConnell’s two air refueling wings, the 22nd and 931st Air Refueling Wings. Eventually, McConnell will have 36 KC-46s to replace its aging fleet.
TOPEKA – The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) held the 2019 Harmful Algal Bloom Meeting this week at Washburn University in Topeka. The meeting, which included all Kansas agencies which work on harmful algal blooms, discussed health, monitoring and responses due to harmful algal blooms in area water sources.
“At this year’s meeting we have expanded from our recreational stakeholders to include the public water supply operators and other agencies to find the best ways to address issues as they arise,” said Megan Maksimowicz, an environmental specialist at KDHE’s Bureau of Water.
“We want to make sure that we stay on top of all public health and safety issues connected to HABs. We have not had any toxins above the EPA’s health advisory level from HABs in a public water supply system, but we continue to come up with the best ways to prevent this and to monitor these situations.”
Presentation topics included recreation and reservoir research, animal health, testing and monitoring, nutrient reduction and practices, in-lake mitigation strategies, public water supply monitoring, and planning and response, among other discussions. The meeting, hosted by KDHE’s Bureau of Water, has been held annually every winter to engage stakeholders on this challenging issue affecting lakes in Kansas.
RILEY COUNTY —Law enforcement authorities are investigating an injury accident that occurred just before 7a.m. Saturday in Riley County.
A 2004 Dodge Nissan driven by Justin Pate, 22, Manhattan, struck a pedestrian identified as 47-year-old Curt Bilinger of Manhattan near the 1000 Block of Westloop Place, according to a media release.
Bilinger was transported to Via Christi for treatment of his injuries.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A male police officer was charged Friday with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a female officer during what was described as a deadly game with a revolver.
24-year-old Katlyn Alix -photo courtesy St. Louis PD
Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced the charge against Nathaniel Hendren, 29, in the death of 24-year-old Katlyn Alix, as they allegedly played a game in which a revolver’s cylinder was emptied, one bullet put back and the two colleagues took turns pointing at each other and pulling the trigger.
Alix was with two male officers at an apartment when she was killed just before 1 a.m. Thursday . A probable cause statement from police, provided by Gardner’s office, offered a chilling account of the dangerous game that led to her death.
The probable cause statement said Alix and Hendren were playing with guns when Hendren produced a revolver.
“The defendant emptied the cylinder of the revolver and then put one cartridge back into the cylinder,” the statement said. He allegedly spun the cylinder, pointed the gun away and pulled the trigger.
Click to enlarge
The gun did not fire. The statement said Alix took the gun, pointed it at Hendren and pulled the trigger. Again, it didn’t fire.
Hendren “took the gun back and pointed it at the victim (and) pulled the trigger causing the gun to discharge,” the statement said. “The victim was struck in the chest.”
The other male officer told investigators he warned Hendren and Alix not to play with guns and reminded them they were police officers. He was about to leave when he heard the fatal shot, the statement said.
The male officers drove Alix to a hospital where she died. Hendren also is charged with armed criminal action.
The two men were on-duty at the time of the shooting. Police Chief John Hayden has declined to answer questions about why the officers had gathered at the apartment, which was home to one of the men.
St. Louis police said the charges were the result of a promise Hayden made to Alix’s family to conduct a “thorough and competent investigation.”
Alix, a military veteran who was married, was not working but met the men at the apartment.
Police immediately launched an internal investigation and placed both officers on paid leave. Gardner also began her own investigation on Thursday and enlisted the Missouri State Highway Patrol to conduct it.
Alix was a patrol officer who had graduated from the St. Louis Police Academy in January 2017.
A 2004 Dodge Nissan driven by Justin Pate, 22, Manhattan, struck a pedestrian identified as 47-year-old Curt Bilinger of Manhattan near the 1000 Block of Westloop Place, according to a media release.
