WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2015
Serving Polk County’s St. t Croix C i Valley V ll since i 1897
VOL. 127 NO. 41
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SPORTS: Tennis plays tough schedule. P. 10
Acre-Kendall posts bond, returns to Minnesota
Along the fault Back from Nepal, Arianna Elmquist is safe but broken-hearted
BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@OSCEOLASUN.COM
BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@OSCEOLASUN.COM
On the road to Kathmandu’s “old city” with 11 Nepalese children and a crew of volunteers, Arianna Elmquist didn’t understand, at first, why the van had suddenly jerked. “I thought we’d run over something,” says the Osceola native. “Being a Midwestern girl, I was trying to make sense of it with what I knew: It’s the wind; it’s a crash.” It was a 7.8-magnitude earthquake. On April 25, Elmquist and others from the orphanage she’d been helping at for a month had planned to visit the temples and bustling alleyways of the old city. They’d made it as far as the Monkey Temple, nearly there, when the earth began to shake. “There was rubble coming down,” she says. “Motorbikes were crashing and falling.” The group
SUBMITTED
Arianna Elmquist with children from an orphanage in Nepal, beneath the makeshift shelter they built after the April 25 earthquake. found relative safety in open green area, but their fate was still uncertain. A man who’d taken refuge nearby declared, “We must pray so that God will save us.” Another man countered, saying, “God has already decided who
lives and who dies. We just have to wait to see what happens.” “It was very frightening,” says Elmquist. Once the initial quake had subsided, strong aftershocks swept through the city every 20 minutes or so. Elmquist’s group focused
Levi Acre-Kendall, charged with first-degree reckless homicide in the fatal stabbing of Peter “Pete” Kelly, posted his $75,000 cash bond at about 4 p.m. May 7. Acre-Kendall will now live in his Cambridge, Minn. home with a 9 p.m. curfew, in accordance with bond conditions that were updated May 4. He is not to leave Minnesota except for future court appearances in Wisconsin. Before leaving Polk County, Acre-Kendall was equipped with a GPS device that will monitor his location. As Acre-Kendall was
on getting the children safely back to the orphanage. “We were incredibly lucky, all of us,” she says. Though the orphans and volunteers made it through the ordeal un-
AND SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@OSCEOLASUN.COM
The roads don’t often go straight in northwest Wisconsin. They twist around wetlands, ponds, lakes, and rivers, making it a little tricky to find where the Line 61 oil pipeline crosses the St. Croix River and its tributaries. One might end up thigh-high in mucky cattail stands while hiking to river crossings, where brightly-colored posts stick out of
the ground on either bank. There is no other sign of the river of oil flowing underfoot. Fish swim, birds feed, the water slips ceaselessly past. By next year, there will be 50 million gallons of heavy crude per day flowing through a pipeline beneath the St. Croix River and its tributaries the Eau Claire, the Totogatic, the Namekagon, and all the countless creeks, ponds, and wetlands that flow into them. River crossings are particularly risky for pipelines. A spill in moving water is many times
SEE NEPAL, PAGE 11
more difficult to contain and clean up than on dry land, and the power of rivers increases the chance of a rupture. Two oil pipelines have ruptured in the Yellowstone River in the past five years, together spilling more than 100,000 gallons of oil. Both breaks were blamed on the pipeline being exposed when the water carried away the soils that covered the pipe in the river. After that happened, floating debris and rushing water damaged the pipes and they ruptured. SEE PIPELINE, PAGE 23
SEE BOND, PAGE 11
Osceola man sentenced for sexual assault
Preventing pipeline spills in the St. Croix BY GREG SEITZ STCROIX360.COM
posting bail, prosecuting attorney Dan Steffen asked Judge Molly GaleWyrick to order that Acre-Kendall be put on home arrest. She denied the change, sticking to the May 4 bond conditions. Background Acre-Kendall’s charges are tied to the April 14 death of Pete Kelly, 34, St. Croix Falls. According to the criminal complaint, Acre-Kendall and two friends were fishing on the Wisconsin side of Interstate State Park and began arguing with two men — Kelly and Ross Lechman — fishing on the Minnesota side at
BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@OSCEOLASUN.COM
Justin Ogdahl, 26, was sentenced April 30 to 2 years in 20 p prison aft ter pleading g guilty March 9 to sexually a s s au lt i n g t teenage girls i Osceola. in Ogdahl T h e charges, filed in April 2014, included three felony counts of second-degree sexual assault
MAY 15 Braves vs Metro Merchants
of a child under 16 years of age and one count of sex with a child age 16 or older, a misdemeanor. Ogdahl was charged as a repeat offender because of a 2012 conviction of possession of child pornography. Additionally, Ogdahl was on probation for two previous counts of sex with a child age 16 or older and was not supposed to use the internet or contact anyone under 18; he SEE OGDAHL, PAGE 8
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