Star Tribune
Two charged with attempted murder in St. Paul drive-by shooting that injured 10-year-old
A man and woman have been charged with attempted murder in connection with a New Year’s day drive-by shooting in St. Paul that seriously injured a 10-year-old child.
Prosecutors believe Morris Robert Chie Ryan, 26, and Kelci Marie Meyers, 28, were involved in a drive-by shooting that night which punched nearly a dozen bullet holes into the home of a 10-year-old boy, critically injuring him. The child’s condition has since improved. Ryan and Meyers were charged on Thursday with second-degree attempted murder, first-degree assault and a dangerous weapons violation. Both attended their first court hearings for the case Friday morning.
Charging documents say that the boy and his family were in their home on the 700 block of Sherburne Avenue sometime before midnight on Dec. 31. His mother recorded video of herself dancing in the kitchen with the 10-year-old and his siblings as music played in the background. The boy began playing with Legos when gunshots rang and the mother heard a man yell expletives from the alley behind her home.
She moved the children out of the kitchen as another sibling carried the 10-year-old from the floor to an upstairs bedroom. When officers arrived at the home by around 11:56 p.m., finding a trail of blood leading to that bedroom. “… a 10-year-old boy lay on the bed with family members applying pressure to a gunshot wound to the boy’s stomach and buttock,” the charging documents read. He was taken to Regions Hospital with a life-threatening injury and acute blood loss.
Officers found seven 9mm bullet casings in the alley behind the boy’s home, as well as 10 bullet holes in the rear window near the kitchen.
The mother suspected her former neighbor was a suspect, telling police that the man was a nuisance who continued to threaten residents after moving out of his apartment there. He “said he would make sure (the mother) and her family had to move since he had to move out” she told police, adding that she obtained a harassment restraining order against the man. It was not served by the time of the shooting.
Neighbors’ video footage recorded a dark SUV circle the alley behind the family’s apartment twice before stopping in near the family’s kitchen window. That footage recorded the sound of 14 gunshots before the sedan left the scene.
Traffic cameras revealed the sedan was a 2007 GMC Yukon registered to Ryan. Additional footage captured Ryan and Meyers exiting the Yukon at a Speedway gas station a minute after the child was reportedly shot. Cell phone data confirmed Ryan’s phone was at that gas station and at the scene of the crime that night.
Police later arrested the pair, recovering seven handguns from Meyer’s home in Hastings.
Ryan told police that he stayed inside on New Years day to watch YouTube videos at his mother’s home in New Hope. He stopped answering questions and requested a lawyer when investigators asked about his relationship with Meyers.
Meyers said she spent that day with Ryan and his relatives in Hastings.
When shown pictures of the SUV, Meyers said that it looked like her truck. She said nothing or responded “I don’t know what to say” when asked about the shooting, and shook her head “no” when asked if she called the shots during the shooting.
Meyer’s next court date is scheduled for March 7. Ryan’s is set for March 8. Bail for both has been requested at $700,000, and both suspects have been ordered not to contact the child’s mother.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
