Trial begins for Wetterling killer in another assault case

by MinnPost staff 10/19/201802/06/2024

Another Heinrich trial. The Associated Press reports (via the St. Cloud Times): “A man who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted as a child by the same man who abducted and killed Jacob Wetterling will get a chance to tell his story in court. … Jared Scheierl was 12 when Danny Heinrich assaulted him in Minnesota, nine months before 11-year-old Jacob was kidnapped in October 1989. … Jacob’s abduction grabbed national headlines and was unsolved until 2016, when Heinrich confessed as part of a plea deal in a child pornography case. He’s serving 20 years in federal prison.”

The eyes of the national GOP are fixed on northern Minnesota. The New York Times’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes: “For 70 of the past 72 years, a Democrat has represented this rural corner of northern Minnesota in Congress. But when loggers, foresters and truckers convened on the county fairgrounds here for the annual timber industry expo last month, the star of the “celebrity log-loading” contest was a Republican. … He is Pete Stauber, a former professional hockey player and retired police lieutenant with a ramrod-straight bearing and a politician’s firm grip. He may also be his party’s best hope for pulling off this year’s most improbable feat: flipping a Democratic House seat.”

Maybe not that shocking, unfortunately. For Streetsblog, Angie Schmitt writes: “A ground-breaking experiment in St. Paul, Minn., shows a shocking pattern of dangerous and aggressive behavior towards pedestrians. But also how solvable the problem is given the right attention and policies. … For most of 2018, researcher Nichole Morris, director of the HumanFIRST Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, has been measuring driver yielding at crosswalks around St. Paul.”

Consider this when making weekend plans. The Star Tribune’s Tim Harlow writes: “The leaves are falling and so are the number of road construction projects drivers have to navigate around. But a big one on the weekend comes with a complete shutdown of I-35W in south Minneapolis. … The Minnesota Department of Transportation will close the northbound lanes between Crosstown Hwy. 62 and downtown Minneapolis and the southbound lanes from Interstate 94 to 46th Street on Friday night until Monday morning. The agency is completing a traffic switch and utility work.”