One person died in a crash Saturday in Eagan, and the Minnesota State Patrol is still searching for one of the drivers, but not the one who ran a red light.

According to a news release from the Minnesota State Patrol, Abby Marie Doepke Loughran, 41, of Eagan was driving a Lincoln MKX SUV east just after 3 p.m. on Hwy. 55 in Eagan when she ran a red light and hit a car turning left in front of her.

State Patrol Sgt. Jesse Grabow said in a social media post that one person in the turning car was killed and another hurt.

Loughran, who was not hurt, stayed at the scene of the crash. But Grabow said the other driver ran away.

As of Sunday evening, Grabow said the driver had not been located, and state patrol had yet to confirm the identities of those killed and hurt.

June is Minnesota’s wettest month, and this year it lived up to its billing in spades.

So much rain fell during this year’s sixth month that rivers all across Minnesota jumped their banks and massive flooding swept away homes, drowned downtowns, swamped parks and farm fields, and closed roads.

Though precipitation fell on 16 of June’s 30 days, the 7.27 inches recorded at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport as of Sunday morning didn’t set any precipitation records in the Twin Cities. Not by a long shot.

As soggy as June was, totals in the rain bucket at the Twin Cities official weather observation station made this year only the 14th wettest June on record, well off the all-time mark of 11.67 inches from 1874, according to Minnesota State Climatology Office.

In southern Minnesota, however, new high-water marks were set in Windom, where 14.58 inches of rain fell, breaking the old record of 11.06 inches that had stood since 1914. Even more fell in Wells, in Faribault County on the Iowa border, where 14.94 inches set a new record, besting the previous high of 12.58 set in 2013.

Owatonna entered the record books, too, with its 13.13 inches. But no place may have seen more rain this past month than Faribault. There, the 16.63 inches of rain smashed the old mark of 12.96 set in 2014 and is believed to have been the highest total of any of the National Weather Service’s reporting stations.

Many other cities made it into double-digit rainfall, according to readings turned in to the Weather Service by volunteer observers.

Typically, the Twin Cities sees about 4.58 inches of rain in June, but this year has brought about 2.8 inches more than normal. And it probably seems like more after last year when a paltry .93 inches of rain fell during the year’s sixth month, Minnesota Climatology Office data shows.

The least ever in June was .22 inches in 1988, the data shows.

Why so much this year?

Blame it on a warm front draped over the state, bottling up cooler weather to the north and steamy weather to the south and west. The colliding air masses put the squeeze on Minnesota, Assistant State Climatologist Pete Boulay said.

“It seemed that every weather system was passing over Minnesota,” he said. “We were locked in that weather pattern all of June, and that is a bulk of the issue. That triggers rounds of classic heavy rain.”

June’s deluge did catapult the Twin Cities way up the list of the wettest April, May and June periods going back to 1871. The metro area saw 17.27 inches of rain during those three months, making it the fourth wettest April-to-June of all time, the Climatology Office said.

Still ranking ahead of 2024 is the 17.88 inches that fell in that three-month run in 2001, the 18.89 inches from 1908 and the granddaddy of all, 22.18 in 2014, the Climatology Office said. The last time the Twin Cities had a single wetter month than this June was when 7.82 inches of rain fell in August 2016, Boulay said.

If there has been an upside to the incessant rain, the ever-flowing spigot has kept away the sizzling heat and humidity baking other parts of the country. As of Sunday, the daily average temperature in the Twin Cities in June has been 69.7 degrees, right on par with normal, the Climatology Office said.

The average high and low temperature for this time of the year is 82 and 64 respectively, according to the National Weather Service. Official thermometers have yet to record a 90-degree reading, though it was close at 89 degrees on June 16.

“When it is wet like this, it’s hard to get to 90 degrees,” Boulay said. Dry ground heats much more easily, he said.

It has been a decade since the Twin Cities has gone this late into summer without a 90-degree reading and without one in the month of June. Last year the metro saw 90 degrees or higher nine times in June. The most ever in June was 17 days in 1933, weather records show.

The rainy pattern looks to continue as the calendar turns to July. The National Weather Service is forecasting a 100% chance of rain Monday, with up to an inch of rain possible. Rain remains in the forecast every day this week, including the night of July 4th, which could wash out fireworks.

Will it break anytime soon? The Climate Prediction Center say Minnesota has equal chances of receiving normal amounts of precipitation during July, August and September, so maybe.

Rebecca Cunningham takes over as University of Minnesota president on Monday and almost immediately faces big decisions about how the U should run its medical programs and navigate tensions stemming from the war between Israel and Hamas.

Cunningham, a longtime emergency room physician, worked most recently as vice president of research and innovation at the University of Michigan, which reports one of the largest portfolios in the nation. In recent weeks, she has been attending Board of Regents meetings, scheduling introductions with Minnesota lawmakers and meeting with student groups making competing cases for whether the U should divest from Israel and how it should distinguish between free speech and hate speech.

“I’m so excited to be here,” Cunningham said. “What is actually happening on the ground is just tremendous, and I’ve been so impressed all along the way.”

Already her research background is being called upon. Two landmark U research papers — one focusing on Alzheimer’s disease and another on stem cells — were retracted over concerns about their integrity after researchers elsewhere struggled to duplicate their findings and raised questions about images within them.

The Star Tribune sat down with Cunningham last week to talk about her preparation and plans for tackling some of the most immediate challenges. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: It’s been a rough week for research at the U, with the news that two major papers were being retracted. What’s your analysis of the situation, and how will you prevent that from happening during your tenure?

A: I can speak in broader brushstrokes. Every major institution across the country right now has been facing this. I think it’s unfortunate when poor choices are made along the way that can impact the reputation both of research as a whole and cause concern for the public, when the vast majority of researchers are doing amazing research and are publishing with high integrity.

I dealt with this a lot last year, especially in papers from 20-plus years ago, when it maybe wasn’t quite so easy to spot all of these inconsistencies. I know that there has been a number of policies and procedures put in place here to try to do more education with faculty in the meantime to help them understand what it really means to alter a figure, and that that will be noticed.

To the prevention side: Faculty, unfortunately, are under a tremendous pressure to publish. And we have to work on the climate and support for them so that we they can focus on feeling good about the science they produced, even when it doesn’t produce the results they were hoping for — which is true science.

Q: Have you been involved in the discussions with Fairview Health Services over the future of the U’s teaching hospital? Are you expecting any big changes in trajectory?

A: I’ve been doing learning on the 20 years of detailed negotiations that have been going on, getting familiar with the current, public [letter of intent], have begun to meet the assorted players. That’s where we’re at for right now, and then it will certainly need to be a focus for these next couple of months. I think everyone wants to see that through, in the timeline it was envisioned.

Q: The university is still navigating tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas and the controversy over hiring a director for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Have you been consulting on those issues, and what’s your approach?

A: I’ve been updated on them. Obviously, academic freedom is critically important. I have not been involved in the decisionmaking to date. I did get to meet with both the Divest group and the group of Jewish students that [interim] President [Jeff] Ettinger had been meeting with. I think that they were great conversations, and I’m just proud to have students that are engaged and sitting down in this manner, really respectfully looking for collective solutions.

Obviously, we are bound by free speech. We’re a public university. However, we have to have a welcoming climate for all of our students and we have to be mindful of when that free speech transitions over into individual harassment. And, more than that, whatever we can do to help our students also just be mindful of how they’re coming off to each other … whatever we can do to help our students work toward feeling inclusiveness, even when they disagree, is going to be critical.