(Red Oak, Iowa) – An SUV was struck by a car early Tuesday afternoon in Red Oak, but neither driver was injured. According to Red Oak Police, a 2015 KIA driven by a 17-year-old female from Red Oak, was pulling-out from Maple Street onto North Broadway Street a little after 1-p.m., at the same time a 2020 Nissan Murano driven by 75-year-old Shirley DeWitt, of Red Oak, was traveling on N. Broadway. The car broadsided the SUV, causing a total of $8,000 damage. The SUV was disabled in the crash and was towed from the scene.

Red Oak Police cited the 17-year-old for Failure to Yield upon entering a through Highway.

(Clarinda, Iowa) – The office of Page County Attorney James L. Varley, Tuesday, released a report on the outcome of court cases prosecuted during the week of Sept. 29, 2025.

The report says 51-year-old Brian Keith Huseman, of Coin, Iowa, appeared with counsel and pled guilty to Count I: Possession with Intent to Deliver Methamphetamine and Count II: Possession with Intent to Deliver Marijuana. The Defendant was sentenced to 10 years of incarceration and fined $1,000 on Count I and 5 years of incarceration and a $1,025 fine for Count II. The terms of incarceration shall run concurrently with each other. Both terms of incarceration and the fines were suspended, and the Defendant was placed on probation for 3 years. As a condition of probation, the defendant was ordered to obtain a drug/alcohol evaluation and follow through with any recommendations, as well as reside at the Residential Correctional Facility until maximum benefits have been achieved. The Defendant was ordered to pay court costs, surcharges and court-appointed attorney fees.

49-year-old Jeremy Todd McAllister, Shenandoah, Iowa, appeared by counsel and pled guilty to Serious Assault. The defendant was granted a deferred judgment for a period of one year and placed on probation. The defendant was ordered to pay court costs, surcharges, victim restitution and court-appointed attorney fees.

Page County Courthouse

35-year-old Travis Christopher Tompkins, of Bedford, Iowa, appeared by counsel and pled guilty to Possession of a Controlled Substance, Cannabidiol- 1st Offense. The defendant was sentenced to 2 days of incarceration and fined $430. The defendant was ordered to pay court costs, surcharges and court-appointed attorney fees.

And, Varley says 20-year-old Mark K. Whitehill, of Shenandoah, appeared with counsel and pled guilty to Count I: Criminal Mischief-1st Degree; Count II: Operate Vehicle Without Owner’s Consent: and Count III: Operating While Under the Influence-1st Offense. The Defendant was granted a deferred judgment on counts I and III and placed on probation for 2 years. As a condition of probation, the defendant was ordered to obtain a drug/alcohol evaluation, attend and successfully complete the Drinking Driver’s School and pay all restitution ordered. With respect to Count II, the defendant was fined $855 which was suspended. The defendant was ordered to pay court costs, surcharges, victim restitution and court-appointed attorney fees.

(Radio Iowa) – State Auditor Rob Sand, a Democrat who’s running for governor, held a town hall meeting in his hometown of Decorah last (Tuesday) night. It was the 100th and final stop on a tour of the state he launched at the end of June. During a recent Radio Iowa interview, Sand said many of the Iowans he’s met during the tour are fed up with politics. “The primary problem that we have right now is partisanship by which I mean the idea that we would judge an idea based on who said it’s good or who said it’s bad. ‘Oh, they like that idea? Then it must be terrible,'” Sand said. “This is the kind of nonsense that I think is destroying our state. It’s destroying our country.”

Crowd at a Sand campaign stop in Decorah on Oct. 21, 2025. (Photo from his campaign Facebook page)

Sand says the tour has been invigorating. “When you feel like things aren’t going well, you roll up your sleeves and you get to work,” Sand said, “and that feels better.” Sand was first elected State Auditor in 2018 and reelected in 2022. He is the only Democrat currently serving in statewide elected office. Sand began this year with over eight MILLION dollars in his campaign account.

Republicans have criticized Sand for accepting four MILLION dollars in contributions from his inlaws, who own a major agribusiness and have previously donated to Republican Governors Terry Branstad and Kim Reynolds, who is not seeking reelection in 2026.

(Radio Iowa) – Studies show about one in eight Iowa women will get breast cancer during their lifetime, and while those numbers are holding steady, there’s a rise in breast cancer cases among young women who typically aren’t yet being screened. Dr. Hope Guzzo, a breast surgeon at Emplify Health by Gundersen, says that presents some unique challenges for women under 40. “It is scary,” Guzzo says. “Younger women can have more advanced cancers just because we aren’t screening them. So typically they are the ones that are coming in because they felt something, and by that time, it’s larger than someone that we would detect on screening.” Breast cancer screenings are recommended to start around age 40, while those who are considered at high risk should start mammograms even sooner. When found early, women have more treatment choices and a better chance of recovery.

“Rates aren’t going down, but we’re also getting better at detecting because our screening is getting better, which is a huge goal,” Guzzo says. “Our goal is to screen more women, and yes, by doing more screening, we will catch more cancers, but if we can catch them early, that’s the whole goal.” Younger women may be hesitant to seek a doctor’s counsel when they find a possible lump. “It’s easy to feel like they’re going to get blown off or feel like, ‘Well, because I’m 25, I couldn’t get breast cancer,’ but anytime you’re worried about something, I would rather you come to my clinic and I can do an exam, and if I’m worried about it, we can do imaging,” Guzzo says. “I would rather do more of those exams and find nothing, then have women sit at home and worry about something or be scared to come in.”

Roughly 27-hundred Iowa women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and almost 400 die from it. It’s the number-two cancer killer of Iowa women behind only lung cancer.

Emplify Health by Gundersen has clinics in Calmar, Decorah, Fayette, Lansing, Postville and Waukon, and a hospital in West Union.

(Radio Iowa) – A spokesman for the trade group called Fur Commission U-S-A reports someone illegally entered a mink farm in southwest Iowa near Woodbine Monday night. Spokesman Challis Hobbs says a farmer, his son and grandson raise more than one-thousand mink and found the perimeter fence torn down.  )”That’s what they woke up to, and they woke up to a lot of the pens had been opened and like the housing, so like the nest box like where it’s warm and stuff where the mink stay, the people who came in, they destroyed those,” he says. Hobbs says around half of the mink stayed around and they’ve been working to find the others as they are domesticated and don’t do well in the wild.

“What we see time and time again is like within 24 to 48 hours, if the farmer can’t recover them, the majority of them die. The ones that don’t, they kind of get loose and they’re desperate and they’re carnivorous. So they’re killing anything and everything they can to eat,” he says. Hobbs says they might survive for awhile eating any birds or chickens they can find, but they often die or are hit on the roadway and killed. Hobbs says there have been some recent attacks on fur farms in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and they are not just vandals. “Everyone who’s been caught doing this has been activists. It’s very organized, it’s organized crime really is,” Hobbs says. “Like for example the ones in Pennsylvania, they showed up and they had. They had a whole a whole pamphlet of like what to do, not to get caught. Like turn off your cell phone and what to do if you get caught. What to say and don’t turn on your other basically activist friends, extremist activist friends who are doing the same thing.”

He says local law enforcement and the F-B-I are investigating the Woodbine case. “These crimes do fall under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Because the government does see this as domestic terrorism because they’re intentionally going on these farms and trying to basically shut them down and put these put these farming families out of business,” Hobbs says.

Hobbs says two people were caught in the Pennsylvania and they face multiple charges. Hobbs says the animals cost around 45 dollars each, but it can cost the farmer much more in losing animals for breeding.

(Red Oak, Iowa) – A traffic stop late Tuesday night in Villisca resulted in the arrest of a woman from Harrison County. According to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, 45-year-old Nicholle Annette Gibson, of Missouri Valley, was arrested at around 10:37-p.m.,  for Driving While Barred. Gibson was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $2,000 bond.

DES MOINES, Iowa (KCCI) – Former Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Ian Roberts has pleaded not guilty to federal immigration charges, KCCI reports. Court documents show Roberts was charged with making a false statement for employment and illegal immigrant in possession of a firearm. A grand jury says Roberts lied on his I-9 submitted as part of his hiring process for Des Moines Public Schools in 2023. The jury says Roberts said he was a U.S. citizen “knowing he was not in fact a United States citizen.”

Federal authorities moved Roberts from the Woodbury County Jail to a federal facility in Council Bluffs. There is a hearing for Roberts set for Wednesday, where the court could set a date for his trial.

If found guilty, Roberts could be fined, imprisoned for up to 15 years, or both.

CRESTON, Iowa — According to a report from KCCI-TV, a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Creston Community School District from moving forward with plans to fire a teacher for her comments regarding the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Last month, Melisa Crook, a high school English teacher from Creston, was informed that she was facing termination for a social-media comment regarding Kirk.

Crook then sued the district in federal court, citing a series of pro-Republican posts by Superintendent Deron Stender and school board president Don Gee, and alleging that her First Amendment rights were being violated. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger recently granted Crook’s motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction blocking the district’s plans to terminate her. The judge also deferred Crook’s request for a preliminary injunction until after a court hearing that’s currently planned for Oct. 31, 2025.

The order prevents the district’s school board from conducting Crook’s employment hearing, scheduled for Oct. 21, 2025, and from “taking any other adverse employment actions” against Crook based on her Facebook comments. In her ruling, Ebinger found that Crook “is likely to succeed in showing Stender took adverse action against her in response to exercise of her First Amendment rights” and that she is “likely to succeed on the merits of her First Amendment claim as to Stender.”

Ebinger added that she concluded “Crook spoke as a citizen on a matter of public concern when posting her Facebook comment.” As part of her ruling, Ebinger observed that Crook had “responded to and discussed the murder of a public figure, Charlie Kirk, and her (subsequent) longer post clarified her intent” in posting the original comment. “Crook posted her Facebook comments on her personal time, at home, from her personal Facebook account,” Ebinger stated in her ruling. “She did not purport to speak as an employee of the Creston Community School District.

The school district had argued that a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction would defeat its decision to discharge an employee and improperly extend “the employment of a potentially incompetent employee.” Ebinger rejected that argument, stating that “the court finds the enforcement of First Amendment rights outweighs any potential employment harm to defendants. Further, the public has a compelling interest in protection of First Amendment and other constitutional rights.”

As part of her ruling, the judge denied Crook’s request to be removed from administrative leave.

DES MOINES, Iowa [KCCI-TV] — Des Moines Public School leaders voted to approve Associate Superintendent Matt Smith’s contract as the district’s interim superintendent.

Under the new contract, Smith will serve in the new role through June 30, 2027. He took over the role on September 26.The annual salary written into the contract is $286,716 for the first year, which is a more than $25,000 increase from his current salary.

The new contract is the same salary former Superintendent Ian Roberts was earning. After the first year, the board will determine raises based on Smith’s performance.