The Waterloo School District is announcing its return-to-learn plan. The District is planning to begin in-person instruction during the week of August 24th. There may be a staggered start for various grade levels that the first week. High schools may have a combination of in-person and remote learning. Exact start dates for each grade level will be announced in next month. While every Waterloo student will automatically be enrolled for in-person instruction, parents may elect virtual instruction through an application process. The district noted that the plan is subject to change, with final details to be announced in a few weeks.
Police are investigating a late night shooting that damaged a home in Waterloo. Neighbors called police after hearing gunfire just after 10:30 Wednesday night. Officers found bullets struck a home in the 600 block of Warren Drive. The resident was home, but no injuries were reported. Police say they don’t think the house was the intended target.
Two 13-year-old males have been charged following break-ins at Riverfront Stadium in Waterloo Wednesday night. Officers were first called to an alarm at the press box around 6 o’clock Wednesday, but the perpetrators had left the area. A second alarm came just after 10:30 p.m., this time at the stadium’s concessions stand. Officers caught the two nearby and charged them with third-degree burglary.
A Cedar Rapids man has been arrested and charged with stealing from patrons’ bags at Lost Island Water Park. Waterloo police arrested 21-year-old Austin Klenk Wednesday on a charge of second-degree theft. Police say surveillance video showed Klenk grab a number of bags from picnic tables at the water park and head for the men’s lock room on June 28th. He then returned to the tables two more times, grabbing more bags and returning to the locker room. Police say he took $1,400 worth of items from the bags and dumped the empty bags in the trash. Klenk has a prior burglary conviction for trying to take items from parked cars in Marion in 2019.
State figures show the number of coronavirus cases in Iowa increased by more than 700 in the past 24 hours and that the number of deaths, hospitalizations and patients admitted to intensive care were all rising. Iowa Department of Public Health information yesterday showed 18 people died in the previous 24 hours, the highest single-day number since early June. An agency spokesperson says some deaths listed were from a long-term care facility that wasn’t reporting the cases in the state tracking system. The number of new positive cases increased yesterday…this after five consecutive days of fewer cases.
Investigators say they have launched a massive search for a 10-year-old missing girl in a rural area outside of Clinton. Davenport Police Maj. Jeff Bladel said that “newly developed information” in the disappearance of 10-year-old Breasia Terrell has shifted the search to the Clinton and Camancha area in eastern Iowa. He says a dozen law enforcement agencies and scores of volunteers were participating in the search, based in the tiny town of Low Moor. Bladel says investigators have identified a “wide area to search.” Terrell vanished last week after spending the night at the apartment of her half-brother’s father, a convicted sex offender who has been called a person of interest in the case.
An Iowa meth kingpin who kidnapped and killed five Iowans, including two young girls, to thwart his prosecution for drug trafficking in 1993 is set to become the third federal inmate to be executed this week. Fifty-two-year-old Dustin Honken would become the first defendant from Iowa to die from capital punishment since 1963 if his lethal injection takes place as scheduled today in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he has been on death row for the past 15 years. Iowa abolished the death penalty for state offenses in 1965, but federal prosecutors sought that punishment against Honken because of the nature of his crimes. This week’s federal executions have been the first in 17 years.
Iowa, South Carolina and South Dakota have now joined Nebraska in agreeing to share driver’s license information with the U.S. Census Bureau to help the Trump administration determine the citizenship status of every U.S. resident. Until recently, Nebraska had been the sole state to sign an agreement with the Census Bureau to share their information. President Trump ordered the Census Bureau last year to gather citizenship data from the administrative records of federal and state agencies after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his administration’s effort to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire.
The Iowa City Police Department is investigating a recent increase in the use of counterfeit money in the city. Retailers are being asked to test any large bills they find suspicious by using counterfeit detector pens and UV counterfeit detector machines. If a resident or retailer thinks they received a counterfeit bill, they should contact police as soon as possible. This comes about a week after Cedar Rapids police announced they were investigating counterfeit $50 bills circulating in that city.
About half of Hiawatha’s police officers have tested positive for COVID-19. Police Chief Dennis Marks says 8 officers tested positive and became ill at the same time this past weekend. However, the department is still maintaining staffing levels and handling all calls with no interruption of service.
Officials say an Omaha health clinic that offered unproven stem cell treatments for joint pain, erectile dysfunction and Alzheimer’s disease defrauded consumers in Iowa and Nebraska out of at least $2.8 million. The attorneys general of Iowa and Nebraska have each filed a lawsuit against Regenerative Medicine and Anti-Aging Institutes of Omaha, alleging that company officials made misleading statements about the effectiveness of their treatments. They say company officials targeted mostly elderly customers with local television advertisements and in-person seminars with high-pressure sales tactics. According to the lawsuit, company officials claimed they could reverse the aging process and treat conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, arthritis and erectile dysfunction.
