A man from Montrose, Minn., was killed late Friday when his sedan collided head-on with a westbound SUV on Hwy. 12 in Independence, a stretch of road that highway safety advocates have dubbed the “Corridor of Death” for its accidents.

Destin Michael Ertel, 32, was declared dead at the scene of injuries from the crash, according to the West Hennepin Public Safety Department. The SUV driver, a 35-year-old Bloomington man, was taken to a local hospital by North Memorial Ambulance in serious condition.

According to authorities, one of the vehicles crossed over the center line and collided with the other shortly after 10 p.m. Friday, near Lake Haughey Road. It wasn’t known whether alcohol was a factor, but driver distraction may have played a role in the crash, authorities said.

Authorities closed that area of Hwy. 12 for five hours from late Friday into Saturday, when they reopened the highway at 3 a.m. West Hennepin police were investigating the accident, with help from the State Patrol, Hennepin and Wright County sheriff’s offices, and other local agencies.

A Minnesota Department of Transportation report issued in 2022 found that fatal crashes were “expected to continue if no changes are made” to the busy stretch of Hwy. 12 that goes through Independence. The Highway 12 Safety Coalition has named Hwy. 12 between Delano and Maple Plain the “Corridor of Death” for the number of crashes there since 2009, including at least eight fatal collisions.

West metro leaders and law enforcement officers along Hwy. 12 have met since 2014 to improve the two-lane highway, which is said to have been mostly unchanged since the 1930s. Advocates have lobbied for four lanes and a median barrier in the area of Friday’s accident. The corridor carries between 14,000 and 19,000 vehicles daily.

Staff writer Tim Harlow contributed to this story.

As harried commuters arrived on the Northstar Commuter Rail platform in Minneapolis last week, Metropolitan Council Chair Charlie Zelle and other Metro Transit employees met them, bearing cookies and words of thanks.

The celebratory sweets marked Northstar’s 15th birthday this month, a quiet milestone for rail service between Target Field and Big Lake that has struggled for relevance from the very beginning, especially after a precipitous decline in ridership during the pandemic.

The big question forever dogging Northstar is whether the line will ever connect to St. Cloud, as originally planned more than 15 years ago.

The current answer? No one knows. And, unlike previous years, there doesn’t appear to be any groundswell of support bubbling up at the moment to make the final 28-mile connection between Big Lake and St. Cloud a reality.

“Northstar has never lived up to its aspirations,” said Zelle, who, as the head of the Met Council, oversees transportation planning in the metro.

While Northstar has been successfully ferrying suburban Minnesota Twins and Vikings fans downtown on game days, Zelle said daily commuter service “falls into the challenges of express routes in general.”

With the rise of hybrid work during the pandemic and pronounced shifts in the way people commute to work, Northstar provides three southbound trips and one northbound trip each weekday morning, and three northbound trips and one southbound trip on weekday afternoons. No weekend service is available, except for special events.

For now, Metro Transit’s proposed operating budget preserves current service on Northstar. Whether that will change is unclear.

A group of 10 nonprofits that oversee almost all of the publicly funded charter schools in Minnesota refuses to turn over documents showing how they handle contract violations by the schools they supervise, arguing that they are private organizations not subject to the state law requiring disclosure of all public records.

The Minnesota Star Tribune filed requests for the records in early November as part of the newspaper’s ongoing investigation of Minnesota’s troubled charter school sector. The Star Tribune published a three-part series detailing oversight problems and widespread failures among Minnesota’s charter schools in September.

So far this year, nine of the 181 charters schools operating in the state at the beginning of 2024 have closed — the most since the first charter school failure in 1996, state records show.

At least one more charter school, STEP Academy — which has campuses in St. Paul and Burnsville and is one of Minnesota’s largest charter schools — has been threatened with the termination of its contract. It was repeatedly cited for contract violations by Innovative Quality Schools (IQS), the nonprofit that oversees the school on behalf of the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE).

To find out if other charter schools are on the brink of collapse, the Star Tribune asked all 12 of the state’s authorizers for letters sent to schools this year documenting concerns over failing academics, financial instability or other issues that could jeopardize a school’s ability to remain open.

The documents are not available from MDE because the department does not routinely require authorizers to provide such records, MDE officials said in a previous interview.

The only authorizers that complied with the Star Tribune’s request are two public school districts that oversee three charter schools. One of those schools, TRIO Wolf Creek Distance Learning Charter School in Chisago City, received a warning letter in June that outlined three concerns, including the school’s failure to meet various “equity and inclusion” goals. The school’s authorizer, Chisago Lakes School District, accepted the school’s corrective action plan in September.

Though private organizations typically are exempt from the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, that exemption is lifted when nonprofits enter into agreements with the government to carry out some of its functions, such as regulating a large portion of the state’s public school sector, said the Star Tribune’s attorney, Leita Walker.