Star Tribune
MN officers donate gifts, cheer for holidays
Panya Yang met the Paw family when all hope seemed lost.
As a St. Paul police officer, Yang has patrolled the East Side for three years. He met the Paw family while responding to reports of a person in crisis and learned their needs ran deep: the family patriarch had died in a car accident 10 years before, and a son had died in an accident shortly after graduating college. Narcotics had compounded another son’s mental health struggles, leaving the mother to care for him and her daughter.
“To her it feels like she doesn’t have anybody to turn to,” Yang said. “It feels like she needs something to look for, to feel like somebody cares.”
That’s why Yang and law enforcement officers from across the state volunteered Saturday to deliver presents to the Paw family and others in need, as part of the Minnesota Asian Peace Officers’ Association’s Glow of Hope event.
Glow of Hope, which launched in 2008, collects and distributes gifts for struggling families. Officers submit the names of families they encounter in their work for consideration before the organization chooses those whose needs are greatest.
Last year, the association delivered gifts to five families with help from the Karen Organization of Minnesota. This year the group chose three families, allowing them to focus on the quality rather than quantity of the gifts. Donations raised throughout the year fund the gifts they distribute.
St. Paul officer Keng Her, the association’s president, said many of the members come from immigrant families themselves, which motivates them to volunteer and help with donating gifts.
“Glow of Hope is to be a shining light for the families during the holidays,” Her said. “Whatever our parents were able to scrounge to give to us, we cherished it. So knowing our community and also the people that we serve, we wanted to do the same thing back to them.”
One person was killed Saturday afternoon when two vehicles collided on an icy highway in Inver Grove Heights, according to the State Patrol.
Authorities said a pickup truck lost control at the top of an entrance ramp from Concord Boulevard leading onto Hwy. 52, crossing over the northbound lanes and colliding with an SUV heading north. The pickup came to a rest on the left shoulder while the SUV stopped in the left lane.
The victim was not wearing a seat belt in the accident, which happened at about 1:30 p.m. Inver Grove Heights police and fire responded to the crash.
Jim Carlson, a head shop owner found guilty in 2013 on dozens of felony charges after experts said he sold enough synthetic drugs to cause a public health crisis in Duluth, had his sentence commuted Thursday as one of nearly 1,500 convicted criminals granted clemency by President Joe Biden.
Carlson received a 17½-year sentence after a jury found him guilty on 51 of 55 felony counts for selling synthetic drugs from his store in downtown Duluth. His two-week federal trial in Minneapolis, considered the most significant trial in Minnesota involving synthetic drugs, included charges of conspiracy, misbranding drugs, distributing a controlled substance and making illegal monetary transactions.
His girlfriend also was convicted on four felony counts, and his son was acquitted on two felony counts but convicted of two misdemeanors.
In addition to the commutations announced Thursday, Biden pardoned 39 people, including three Minnesotans. Those with commuted sentences had been placed in home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and those pardoned were convicted of nonviolent crimes that included drug offenses. The White House called Biden’s act “the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.”
According to the news blog Perfect Duluth Day, Carlson will be officially released Dec. 22 but serve probation for the next few years. After doing time at a low-security federal prison in Michigan, he has been monitored by authorities at an undisclosed location.
Long lines of addicts were drawn to his store, called The Last Place on Earth, to the consternation of other downtown businesses. A business owner next door said Carlson’s store had made it “like a crack neighborhood.”
Prosecutors alleged Carlson sold synthetic drugs that were misbranded as incense, potpourri, bath salts and glass cleaner, while using employees as guinea pigs to test how the unregulated drugs worked on customers.
At his sentencing in Aug. 2014, he argued at length that the government had led him to believe the drugs he sold were legal and that the nation’s war on drugs was a failure. “Is this your ‘Reefer Madness’ moment?” he asked U.S. District Judge David Doty, referring to the movie made to scare people from smoking marijuana.
“It’s been a huge shift,” he said.
Deqa Muhidin, a former schoolteacher, children’s book author and Somali language heritage program coordinator at the Minneapolis Public Schools Multilingual Department, said the Sing-Again project would be a great addition to what was already in place.
The district’s Somali Heritage Language Program was launched in 2021 and has grown to 270 students in kindergarten through fourth grade.
The program is more than a language-learning program, she said, also teaching Somali culture.
The Somali language has its own cultural insights, which are only spoken by elders, and once they are no longer here, those insights will be lost, Muhidin said. For example, elders might use the phrase, “Look at something in your foot,” meaning run. Or a merchant may tell a customer, “I’m going to close my eyes,” meaning this is my final offer, she said.
