Star Tribune
Allina hospitals and clinics collecting ‘Free Bikes 4 Kidz’ on Saturday
Free Bikes 4 Kidz, a national cycling nonprofit that Minneapolis resident Terry Esau started in 2008, will have its annual bike collection day on Saturday.
From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., dozens of Allina hospitals and clinics around the state will serve as drop-in centers for Minnesotans who want to clear their garages of gently used bikes. Volunteers will then refurbish and redistribute them to local community organizations that serve kids. Seventeen other cities around the county will be doing the same.
A full list of collection sites can be found at fb4kmn.org/pedaling-news/2022-bike-collection.
“I started it as a hobby because I just saw all my friends had little kids’ bikes sitting in their garages,” said Esau. “So we started collecting … We’ve given away about 130,000 bikes now and we have a goal in the next five years to be in 100 cities and give away a million bikes.”
Free Bikes 4 Kidz holds the Guinness World Record for the largest donation of bicycles to charity in 24 hours. This year, it partnered with Trek bikes to give away approximately 300 bicycles to Ukraine to help healthcare workers deliver supplies to areas that have been hard to reach.
A 63-year-old Eveleth man died from injuries suffered in a house fire in the northern Minnesota city Friday morning.
Dale Wallander of rural Eveleth was found with burns covering most of his body at the end of the driveway to his house in the 7100 block of Antoinette Road in Eveleth at about 11:26 a.m. Friday, according to a press release from the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office.
Law enforcement arrived to find his house engulfed in flames. Wallander was transported to a metro area hospital by Life Link air medical service, but died of his injuries, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The cause of the fire is under investigation by the Sheriff’s Office and the State Fire Marshal.
Brooklyn Park police arrested two people Saturday in connection with an early-morning shooting that left one man dead.
Police responded to a shooting in the 7900 block of Lee Avenue North at about 4:36 a.m. Saturday, and found a man with a gunshot wound, according to a Brooklyn Park Police Department press release. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and hasn’t yet been identified.
Later Saturday, Brooklyn Park detectives arrested two suspects who are being held at the Hennepin County Jail, according to police.
“We passed three of them and we did it [in a] bipartisan [way],” said Walz, who represented southern Minnesota in Congress for a dozen years before running for governor.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz holds Matt Kucharski’s dog, Libby, a 6-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer, to give her a drink during the annual Minnesota Governor’s Pheasant Hunting Opener. (Anthony Souffle)
Following the event, Walz’s motorcade wound its way north and east across farm country, past combines in fields harvesting corn, to downtown Sleepy Eye, where he slipped into a crowded brewery. In many ways, the trip resembled any year for a pheasant opener, save this time the motorcade, a dozen vehicles long, stretched out the back side of a downtown Sleepy Eye alleyway.
One patron, who declined to give her name but said she grew up in Madelia and lived in New Ulm, was purchasing a six-pack of beers when she told the bartender, “Is that Walz? I don’t got time for that guy.”
Later, when Walz briefly emerged from a side room, a chorus of cheers reached him from the balcony, before he hustled out to the motorcade.
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