Star Tribune
Minnesota Capitol staffer finds joy in boxing, training youth
Jorge Mendoza bobs from side to side as 9-year-old Oliver Olthoff swings at the punching mitts he’s wearing on either hand.
“You’ve got to slip to the side, slip to the side like this,” Mendoza, 26, says as he demonstrates proper fighting stances for Oliver.
One. Two. One. Two.
The boy makes contact with Mendoza’s mitts a couple of times before it’s the next child’s turn. Parents congregate on the outskirts of the boxing ring at Element Gym at St. Paul as Mendoza trains about a dozen children — ranging from 7 to 16 — the basics of the sport. For the last year, Mendoza has spent two hours every Saturday training children with Down syndrome and other cognitive disabilities.
“The way Jorge connects with these kids, he’s a success story,” Element Gym owner Dalton Outlaw said. “That proves we need to do more of this.”
The sessions are a boon for parents, who say it’s one of the few places where their kids don’t feel like the odd ones out. When Maura Caldwell’s son Benjamin participates in other activities, she said, she feels like she has to keep one eye on him to make sure he’s interacting with the other children, or that he isn’t overstimulated. In Mendoza’s ring, as he and helpers wrangle the kids, “we kind of get to exhale here,” Maura Caldwell said.
“His willingness and comfort in this chaos is great,” she said.
The lessons typically end with Mendoza, wearing a protective suit that covers his torso, dodging the punches of the students. The suit looks a little like an oversized pair of overalls. Every once in awhile, one of the kids lands a blow.
“It doesn’t hurt, unless they manage to get a low blow,” Mendoza said with a chuckle.
Patrick Murphy, Mendoza’s surrogate father, says the lifelong St. Paul resident’s ability to connect with kids is his “golden talent.”
“He’s always engaged with youth,” Murphy said. “I couldn’t be more proud of what he’s become.”
Mendoza met Murphy when he was in middle school. Mendoza’s mother worked nights, so he would spend evenings watching baseball with Murphy and his wife, Dawn. The two share a love for the New York Yankees.
Mendoza’s mother, who was widowed when he was young, remarried just as he was about to start his freshman year at Como Park High. He didn’t want to leave his friends, so Mendoza and his mother struck a deal: He would stay with the Murphys during the week, and the weekends in Inver Grove Heights with his mother, stepfather and baby sister.
When he showed up to history class with a black eye, his teacher pulled him aside and asked if he had ever consideredboxing . It would be a more constructive way to get his aggression out, Mendoza remembers the educator saying.
Mendoza was 17 when he met Outlaw. They bonded immediately.
“Jorge was an athlete,” Outlaw said. “He was a natural.”
Mendoza began competing on the amateur circuit. His first official fight was at a bar and grill in Shakopee. He lost. A rematch weeks later was his first victory. He fought a few exhibitions before the pandemic shut down competitions.
For awhile, Mendoza was Dawn Murphy’s primary caretaker as she battled illness. She died in 2021.
Mendoza wanted to keep boxing. In 2023, Outlaw asked Mendoza if he’d help teach youth lessons through a partnership Element had begun with the Down Syndrome Association of Minnesota.
Around the same time, Mendoza began climbing the ranks at the Minnesota State Capitol, where he’d spent the six years working as a page for House Sergeant-at-Arms Bob Meyerson. An administrative assistant position had also just opened up in the House of Representatives, a full-time gig.
Patrick Murphy is the chief clerk of the state House. He said he kept his distance while Mendoza went through interviews. A few representatives knew how close they were, but Mendoza said he steered clear of Murphy when he was applying for the job. “I wanted to get the job on my own,” Mendoza said.
He spends floor sessions running documents and relaying paperwork to House Speaker Melissa Hortman. Mendoza aspires to sit in front of the speaker’s chair someday as a legislative clerk and wants to keep up the Sunday trainings at Element.
“I love working with these kids because they have no ego,” Mendoza said. “They’re just here to have fun.”
“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.
