Star Tribune
Metro Transit hires homeless to clean light rail stations in St. Paul
With gray skies hinting of rain, more than a half dozen people set out Monday morning in St. Paul, wearing purple vests and donning trash buckets and pincher tools.
Most were homeless, or recently without shelter. They had instructions to clear out litter from several Green Line light rail stations and bus stops throughout the Capitol city.
They earn weekly paychecks working for the St. Paul nonprofit Listening House under a pilot program launched earlier this year called St. Paul Work Now. At first, clean-up teams fanned out in St. Paul, picking up trash in sidewalks, skyways and parks, and shoveling snow during the winter.
Now, the program has been expanded to include picking up litter at Metro Transit Green Line stations in St. Paul, including the Robert Street, Capitol/Rice Street, Western Avenue, Dale Street, Victoria Street, Hamline Avenue and Snelling Avenue stations.
“It puts money in the pockets of people who need it and it helps make the city a little cleaner,” said Molly Jalma, Listening House’s executive director. “It’s a very practical solution.”
Crews also clean A Line arterial bus rapid transit stops at Snelling and University avenues and bus stops near Listening House’s new headquarters at East 7th Street and Lafayette Road (formerly Red’s Savoy Pizza).
For Metro Transit, the clean-up crews are part of a broader plan to make public transportation more welcoming, especially after ridership plunged during the pandemic, giving rise to hybrid work. Cleaner stations, stops, buses and trains were incorporated into the agency’s Safety and Security Action Plan, a strategy designed to make passengers feel safer, especially now as more people return to the office.
“Everyone who travels and works on our system deserves to have an experience that is consistently safe, clean, and welcoming,” Metro Transit General Manager Lesley Kandaras said.
Star Tribune
St. Paul shooting victim dies from injuries, shortly after city leaders make plea to public about gun violence
A 24-year-old St. Paul man who was shot in the head earlier this month died from his injuries Friday, shortly after a range of city and community leaders made a public plea about gun violence in the state’s capital.
The homicide marks the city’s 10th since mid-September – eight of which were committed by firearms, according to a Star Tribune database.
On Monday, police announced the death of Dejuan Hemphill, 24, of St. Paul, who was found shot Nov. 5 just before 5 p.m. in the area of Rice Street and University Avenue West in the city’s Frogtown neighborhood.
No arrests have been made. The Star Tribune was unable to locate members of Hemphill’s family Monday.
“We know there are folks who carry because they want to feel safe,” said Mayor Melvin Carter, who added that St. Paul police clear almost all its homicide investigations. “We can keep people safe. St Paul is not a place to fire a gun.”
In the last two months, St. Paul has seen 10 homicides committed in the city, which includes a fatal police shooting Nov. 9 and other incidents that involved domestic violence, robbery and drugs, according to Police Chief Axel Henry.
“They cross the spectrum and so they don’t all fall in neat categories,” he said. “But they almost all fall in this category: they involve guns and they involve terrible decisions and they involve a level of violence we can’t accept in our city.”
Star Tribune
Attorney for one man charged in migrant family’s death on Canada-Minnesota border says he was duped
FERGUS FALLS, Minn. – Steve Shand was just a cab driver who was tricked into picking up migrants without knowing they were part of a smuggling operation, his defense attorney said on the first day of his trial in federal court Monday.
“Mr. Shand did not agree to participate in any crime,” assistant federal defender Lisa Lopez said in her opening arguments.
She said that co-defendant Harshkumar Patel recruited Shand many times as a driver for groups of people in Florida, where they lived and met, before asking him to start transporting passengers in the Midwest. The first such trip in December 2021 – which prosecutors say was the start of a conspiracy to illegally bring a series of Indian nationals over the northern border – took place after Patel directed Shand to pick up some people at Love’s Travel Stop in Drayton, N.D. and bring them to Chicago, according to Lopez.
The town wasn’t on the Canadian border; in fact, Lopez noted, it was 30 miles away. She said Shand found nothing particularly suspicious about the job, “and that’s how Mr. Patel sort of eased Mr. Shand into these out-of-state trips. That’s how he had him become an unknowing participant in his scheme because that first trip raised no red flags for Mr. Shand.”
But prosecutors said the two men on trial were so driven to make money off desperate migrants over the course of four subsequent trips that they continued with plans to have a group of 11 people illegally cross the Canadian border into Minnesota during a subzero blizzard on the night of January 19, 2022, leading to a family of four freezing to death.
“This case is about these two men putting profits over people’s lives,” said federal prosecutor Ryan Lipes, turning and pointing at the defendants.
The deaths of Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben, 37; their daughter Vihangi, 11; and son Dharmik, 3, drew international attention and spawned investigations in the U.S., Canada and the family’s native Indian state of Gujarat. (The victims are not related to Harshkumar Patel, who is also from Gujarat.)
Shand and Patel were indicted in Minnesota for conspiracy to transport and bring unauthorized immigrants to the U.S., causing serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy and attempted transportation and aiding and abetting transportation of aliens for commercial advantage and private financial gain.
A 24-year-old man was killed when he was hit by a car along a highway in Maplewood on Monday morning.
The crash occurred on southbound Hwy. 61 near Hwy. 36 at 5:45 a.m., according to the State Patrol. The agency did not detail how the crash happened in a news release and did not immediately return a request for more information.
The driver of the vehicle was a 30-year-old man from Maplewood, the state patrol said. No arrests were announced.
