Stand-Off With Police Prozac 07/07/2001 Iowa Woman Dead in Bizarre Incident With Police Summary:

The second article in "Iowa Briefs"  reads: MISSOURI VALLEY - No charges will be filed against a Missouri Valley police officer who fatally shot a woman last weekend, the Harrison County Attorney said Friday.

Officer Aaron Brensel shot Diana Reese, 40, around 9:30 last Saturday night.

Brensel, 23, was responding to a neighbor's complaint that two people were having sex in Reese's front yard. Reese was shot by Brensel after she threatened him with a knife and refused his repeated orders to drop the weapon, the Harrison County Sheriff's Office said. She died later at Missouri Valley Memorial Hospital.

The Harrison County Attorney said Brensel was justified in using lethal force.

Charles Mahoney, a friend of Reese, said she had been taking Prozac to treat depression.

Mahoney and Reese were drinking together when Reese began to undress and try to have sex with him, Mahoney said. When he refused, she became angry, he said.

Mahoney suffered three stab wounds to the arm in the incident.

______________________________________________________________________________________________
IOWA BRIEFS
Telegraph Herald (Dubuque, IA)
July 7, 2001
Author: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Estimated printed pages: 6


Company agrees to buy ethanol

DES MOINES - A subsidiary of an Oklahoma energy company has agreed to market all fuel-grade ethanol produced by Northeast Iowa Grain Processors Cooperative of Earlville.
It's the seventh ethanol marketing agreement struck in six months by Williams Bio-Energy of Tulsa, Okla., the nation's second-largest ethanol supplier, the company announced Friday.

The company supplies about 320 million gallons of ethanol a year. It produces 130 million gallons a year at its plants in Pekin, Ill., and Aurora, Neb., and has purchase agreements with several other plants, including Sunrise Energy in Blairstown and Quad County Corn Processors Cooperative in Galva.

Ron Miller, vice president of Williams Bio-Energy, said the company is expanding its distribution system because of growing demand.

California's request for a waiver from federal clean air rules recently was rejected. The state is phasing out the use of MTBE, an oxygenate which makes fuel burn cleaner, by 2003 after traces of the chemical, a suspected carcinogen, was found in ground water. New York and Connecticut plan to eliminate the use of MTBE by 2004, Miller said.

Doug Bishop, president of Northeast Iowa Grain Processors Cooperative, said the marketing agreement "can encourage investments in our plant, give our bankers a sense of security and, in the future, obtain a better" profit for ethanol.

No charges against officer who fatally shot woman

MISSOURI VALLEY - No charges will be filed against a Missouri Valley police officer who fatally shot a woman last weekend, the Harrison County Attorney said Friday.

Officer Aaron Brensel shot Diana Reese, 40, around 9:30 last Saturday night.

Brensel, 23, was responding to a neighbor's complaint that two people were having sex in Reese's front yard. Reese was shot by Brensel after she threatened him with a knife and refused his repeated orders to drop the weapon, the Harrison County Sheriff's Office said. She died later at Missouri Valley Memorial Hospital.

The Harrison County Attorney said Brensel was justified in using lethal force.

Charles Mahoney, a friend of Reese, said she had been taking Prozac to treat depression.

Mahoney and Reese were drinking together when Reese began to undress and try to have sex with him, Mahoney said. When he refused, she became angry, he said.

Mahoney suffered three stab wounds to the arm in the incident.

Man sentenced for smoking marijuana with son

WATERLOO - A local man has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for smoking marijuana with his 6-year-old son.

James Leroy Holden, 36, pleaded guilty in April to drug distribution and child endangerment. He was sentenced Thursday in Black Hawk District Court.

Judge Jon Fister sentenced Holden to 25 years on two counts of distribution of marijuana to a minor and two 15-year terms for being a habitual offender and manufacturing marijuana.

Holden must serve all four sentences concurrently plus two years consecutively.

He was arrested in May 2000 for allegedly supplying the drug to his son and smoking it with him at their home.

Authorities said that when they searched his home they found three marijuana plants and drug paraphernalia.

Man under investigation for flying with no license

OSKALOOSA - A Fairfield man is under investigation by the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration for flying a plane in Iowa without a pilot's license, officials said Friday.

Mahaska County sheriff's deputies stopped Shawn Duane Miller, 25, earlier this week after following an FBI tip that Miller had misrepresented himself as an Iowa Air Guard F-16 fighter pilot who was also licensed for civilian flying.

Kevin Curran, an FBI supervisor in Des Moines, said no one has been charged in the case.

Oskaloosa Airport manager John Behrens said records show that Miller had flown seven or eight times with passengers and once solo.

FAA Flight Standards District Office Manager Tim Griffith said Miller has no FAA certification.

"We've had him under surveillance for 30 to 45 days," he said.

Miller told a sheriff's deputy that he had falsified license documents and only had 20 hours certification from a school in Louisiana.

Officials said he was using those documents to gain access to planes. He also had photos of himself in a pilot's helmet and jumpsuit in the cockpit of an Iowa Air Guard plane.

Mahaska County Sheriff Charles Van Toorn said flying without a pilot's license is a federal offense and the FBI and the FAA have jurisdiction in the case.

"He had allegedly flown people to different places commercially using an airplane rented from the Oskaloosa airport," Van Toorn said.

The sheriff said he knew of no complaints on Miller's flying ability

"Apparently from the information we got he was a pretty good pilot," he said. "He took some lessons, but not enough to be certified."

Auditor says DHS still hasn't recovered $1.3 million

DES MOINES - A new state audit criticizes the Iowa Department of Human Services for failing to recover nearly $1.3 million that was allegedly misspent between 1993 and 1996.

An investigation by the auditor in October 1997 accused the Sanford Center - a provider of court-ordered treatment services for juvenile delinquents in Sioux City - of establishing unauthorized checking accounts used to make fraudulent payments.

State Auditor Richard Johnson recommended last year and repeated Thursday that the money should be recovered.

Department officials responded that they have requested repayment of the money, but the Sanford Center has appealed.

"Oftentimes, in all parts of government, whether it's judicial or administrative or legislative, things take longer than we might like," said Jessie Rasmussen, director of the Department of Human Services. "We're doing all we can. We're not doing anything to hold them up."

Thursday's audit also revealed that the department has yet to recover $74,361 in overpayments to Kinderland Inc., a Dubuque child-care center.

Investigators were tipped off in 1996 that Kinderland had received extra child-care subsidies by submitting bills that inflated the number of eligible low-income or disabled children cared for at the center.

Department officials said they are trying to recover the money from Kinderland through the criminal courts. The money will come back as restitution, but there have been several postponements of a restitution hearing.

"I can't explain why those things happen," Rasmussen said. "Those processes are very much involved now with the court system. They often take longer than we would like."

Even after Kinderland was convicted of two counts of felony fraud, it continued to receive state aid.

The case sparked legislation this year that would cut off public money to child-care providers found guilty of fraud. The bill passed both chambers of the Legislature in some form but failed to receive final approval.

Hand severed, found in time for reattachment

BLOOMFIELD - A team of 15 men led by a Davis County sheriff's deputy found a hand that had been severed, just in time to have it reattached.

"The important thing is that he got his arm back," Davis County Chief Deputy Clayton Slater said. "We hope he has a safe recovery."

Farmer Keith Sullivan, 50, of rural Bloomfield had been mowing hay on Wednesday morning when his tractor hit a rut and he was thrown from the machine, sheriff's officers said.

The tractor rolled over his left arm, severing it at the wrist.

Sullivan walked a quarter-mile to the road, officials said, where his friend Cindy Riggenbach was driving by. She stopped and helped him into her van, then rushed him to Davis County Hospital in Bloomfield.

"He was conscious - talked the whole time, very aware of what was going on," Riggenbach said.

"He made the comment that other people hadn't stopped," Riggenbach said. "You do what you have to do under the circumstances. It just happened to come together."

By 11:13 a.m., Sullivan was at the hospital. Workers there called the sheriff's office, asking that the hand and wrist be found so they could be surgically reattached. There wasn't much time before the tissue would decay beyond use.

Slater and a team of about 15 men frantically searched the hayfield for more than a half-hour.

At 11:57, the hand was found, wrapped in gauze, placed in ice and taken to the hospital.

Sullivan and his hand were taken by air ambulance to Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines, where the hand was reattached. He was listed in fair condition Thursday.

Eagle population rising

DES MOINES - A record 2,493 bald eagles were counted in Iowa this winter by the Department of Natural Resources.

Eagles were found in 41 counties, down from 50 last year, but the number of eagles counted increased from the previous high of 1,776 in 1999.

DNR wildlife technician Bruce Ehresman said the record-cold winter caused the distribution of eagles to shift. "This (the weather) resulted in low eagle counts on small rivers and extreme high counts on the Mississippi River, particularly in the open areas below the locks and dams," Ehresman said.

This year, 79 percent of the eagles were found along the Mississippi River, up from 30 percent last year.

The number of nesting sites and juvenile eagles is also increasing. More than 120 nesting sites were found in 53 counties - up from 100 in 1999 - and 42 percent of the bald eagles counted were juvenile.

"This is certainly a huge improvement ... from the early 60s when only one in eight bald eagles was a juvenile," Ehresman said.
Section:  Iowa
Page:  a11
Copyright (c) 2001 Telegraph Herald (Dubuque, IA)
Record Number:  2001188041

OpenURL Article Bookmark (right click, and copy the link location):
IOWA BRIEFS