Star Tribune
Itasca County voters re-elect dead commissioner
DULUTH – A deceased Itasca County commissioner candidate won re-election Tuesday by a landslide.
Grand Rapids, Minn., resident Burl Ives, 57, died Sept. 11, a loss that was well-publicized in local media. He was vying for his third term of the board that oversees the large county, which sits more than an hour northwest of Duluth.
Ives defeated Brian Oftelie with nearly three-quarters of the vote.
It was legally too late to remove Ives’ name from the ballot, said Austin Rohling, Itasca County auditor. Now, the board must certify the election results to declare Ives a winner before they can announce a vacancy — both needed to trigger a special election and likely primary, Rohling said. If all goes as expected, the election will be held in the spring, with a primary in February. An appointment, rather than a special election, requires at least half a term to be served.
So, why did people vote for him?
Rohling said Ives’ family asked people considering write-in names to instead vote for Ives.
They wanted him to win “one last time,” he said, so, for many, “it was a memorialization of a life’s legacy as a servant to the people.”
According to Ives’ obituary, he “had a knack for making friends wherever he went. Whether he was snowmobiling, cruising on his motorcycle, fishing, cooking up a storm with friends or striking up conversations with strangers, he embraced life.”
ST. CLOUD – An updated vote count in the House 14B race has widened the gap between DFL Rep. Dan Wolgamott and Republican challenger Sue Ek.
The updated totals come after Sherburne County election staff identified absentee ballots received by the U.S. Postal Service that weren’t included in the unofficial totals uploaded to the Minnesota Secretary of State website on election night, according to a statement issued Thursday night by Sherburne County Administrator Bruce Messelt.
Messelt said the delayed upload was limited to one ballot scanner and “involved an incomplete transfer of data from that scanner to the state election reporting system.”
“This is why election results are unofficial until all tabulations and totals are checked and double checked, and the Canvassing Board meets and certifies the election results,” Messelt said in the release. “This is also why procedures and multiple checks and balances are in place to identify and correct such challenges, should they arise, in the processing and counting of all cast ballots.”
On Wednesday morning, the Secretary of State’s office showed Wolgamott had a 28-vote lead over Ek. The updated results show a difference of 191 votes; Wolgamott now has 50.36% of the vote, with Ek having 49.4%.
For legislative races, taxpayer-funded recounts occur when the results are within 0.5% of the total votes cast.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Star Tribune
Teen is in custody after trying to enter Wisconsin elementary school while armed, police say
The student was taken into custody in Kenosha some six months after police shot and killed an armed student outside a Wisconsin middle school following a report of someone with a weapon. The May shooting in Mount Horeb, outside Madison, sent children fleeing and led to an hourslong lockdown of local schools. Prosecutors announced in August that the officers who fatally shot the student would not face criminal charges.
Kenosha made national headlines in August 2020 after a white police officer shot a Black man during a domestic disturbance, leaving him paralyzed. The shooting spurred several nights of protests. A white Illinois teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people during the unrest, killing two of them.
The shootings became a flashpoint in the national debate over guns, vigilantism and racial injustice. A jury eventually acquitted Rittenhouse of any wrongdoing after he argued he fired in self-defense.
DULUTH – Anthony Nephew, 46, is suspected of shooting four people, including two juveniles, before killing himself in a case that came to light after Duluth police were called to conduct a welfare check Thursday at a house on the 6000 block of Tacony Street.
There, they found Erin Abramson, 47, and Jacob Nephew, 15, dead from apparent gunshot wounds at the house in the quiet West Duluth neighborhood. Crime-scene investigators and Duluth police were on the scene beyond the early evening, and neighbors lingered in their yards.
After discovering Abramson and Nephew, they secured the perimeter of a house on the 4400 block of W. Sixth Street — less than a mile away and across from Denfeld High School — where they found Kathryn Nephew, 45, and Oliver Nephew, 7, also dead from gunshot wounds. Anthony Nephew was also found, apparently dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to Duluth police.
It remains an open investigation.
Kathryn and Anthony Nephew were featured in a 2015 Duluth News Tribune story about the competitive local housing market. Described as a married couple, they had finally found the house in West Duluth. Over the years they added a lofted playhouse and a “gift library” to the property. Anthony Nephew also wrote a column for the same newspaper about the importance of mental health care.
He said in the 2021 column that it’s time to start building better frameworks for mental health in this country. Most Americans, he wrote, deny they have mental health struggles.
“Because they have to, because they’re told to, or because they don’t realize their mind is broken, they keep pushing forward, incurring one psychic injury after another, trauma after trauma, collecting interest, until finally the synapses overload, and they suffer a breakdown,” he wrote.
“For most of us, that’s the best end result. For millions of Americans, a breakdown leads to suicide — or homicide before suicide.
