A 43-year-old man was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison Friday for stabbing to death a fellow resident at a state-operated mental health group home in West St. Paul.

John C. Adams II was found guilty in September in Dakota County District Court of intentional second-degree murder in the death of David Rahn, 68, in 2020. Adams will get credit for 1,777 days already served on his 367-month sentence, and was ordered to pay $2,088 in restitution.

According to the criminal complaint, Adams stabbed Rahn dozens of times in the early morning of Feb. 17, 2020, at the home in the 1500 block of Christensen Avenue. After a staff member heard Rahn scream for help and called 911, police found Rahn unresponsive on the floor of his bedroom with stab wounds to his face, neck and back. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and his death was ruled a homicide.

Adams at first claimed self-defense and later said Rahn had stabbed himself. But the medical examiner found evidence that the victim had tried to fend off the attack. Police found a bloody kitchen knife and a pair of blood-soaked gloves inside bags left at a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses across the street.

Adams was convicted of third-degree assault in 2001 in Hennepin County for smashing a glass in a woman’s face in downtown Minneapolis. The court found him to be “a clear danger to the safety of others” and mentally incompetent to stand trial. His sentence was set aside in exchange for him being put under Security Hospital supervision for at least three years.

In October 2018, Adams was granted provisional discharge from the Security Hospital to the home on Christensen Avenue, but that discharge was revoked less than nine months later for violations of the discharge conditions.

The home of one of three group home operated by the state Department of Human Services for people civilly committed for a mental illness and then discharged from a DHS treatment facility.

Staff writer Paul Walsh contributed to this story.

Health insurer UCare has reached an agreement with HealthPartners clinics, which will allow thousands of patients to continue seeing the same doctors without switching health plans next year.

The two companies announced the agreement Friday evening. The terms are effective immediately.

“As mission-driven organizations, UCare and HealthPartners share a commitment to improving health outcomes for our community, and the organizations’ ongoing collaboration reflects that shared goal,” a joint statement said.

The clinics had been out of network for several years, but UCare had waived rules that would have blocked patients from making appointments. UCare said it would start enforcing the network rules Jan. 1.

Talon Metals, the company proposing an underground nickel mine near Tamarack, Minn., has backed away from a novel plan that would have used a subway-digging machine to carve an underground loop to reach the ore.

Instead, Talon, which hopes to one day supply the materials for Tesla’s electric vehicle batteries, will dig a straight path down to those minerals. The revised environmental assessment worksheet filed Dec. 12 incorporated public, state and tribal feedback, said Jessica Johnson, the vice president of external affairs for Talon.

“We’re reducing the amount of ground disturbance and the amount of rock that we need to handle and manage,” Johnson said.

By no longer using a tunnel boring machine, Talon has sidestepped early concerns from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources about waste rock, potential contamination of water and an untested technology for mining. But building a single, diagonal shaft underground also means that Talon will be blasting rock closer to the surface, at 100 feet below as opposed to 300 feet below.

Talon is still studying how many sulfides will be in the waste rock between the surface and the nickel it is seeking, the company said in filings. Sulfide minerals that can interact with air and water to create acid mine drainage, or release sulfates that are toxic to wild rice.

The company also abandoned a proposal to pile waste rock outside on top of liners, and now says it will store excess rock inside a central building — or ship it along with ore to a processing plant it intends to build in North Dakota.

Several parts of the facility have been moved inside this building, and the central mine shaft will also reach the surface indoors. Johnson described the concept as a “mine in a box.”

But the new design also introduces new questions, said Paula Maccabee of the environmental group WaterLegacy. She questioned how Talon would be able to supply enough fresh air for workers in the mine when the main opening is enclosed. Previously, the loop design had two openings at the surface of the ground.