Star Tribune poll: Clinton leads Trump by 8 in Minnesota

Yet again. Says the Forum News Service, “A Wisconsin girl killed in a crash last week swerved off the road to avoid being struck by another motorist on her cellphone, according to new information released Monday by St. Croix County authorities. The victim, identified by the St. Croix County sheriff’s office as 16-year-old Kyra F. Hayes of Beldenville, died Friday in a crash on Wisconsin 35 in Troy. She was not wearing a seatbelt, according to the sheriff’s office news release.”

Says John Reinan in the Strib, “On a September night two years ago, [Gerald] Mohs hit four bars and downed at least 21 drinks in seven hours before driving a car down the wrong way of a divided highway in Rochester, where he hit another car head on, killing a 9-year-old boy and paralyzing the boy’s 7-year old cousin. Mohs got 57 months in prison for his bender. Now, in what may be the largest civil trial judgment in Olmsted County history, a judge has awarded $15 million to Mohs’ victims.”

Farm to table to jail. Tory Cooney in the PiPress reports, “A St. Paul man was charged Monday with making terroristic threats after confronting a couple in a popular downtown park last weekend … . Glenn Melvin Peterson, 53, approached the husband and wife, both 59, on Sunday afternoon as they sat in Rice Park eating egg rolls purchased from a food truck, according to the criminal complaint filed in Ramsey County District Court. Peterson told the couple that he hadn’t eaten in two days and asked them for their food. When the man said that he had just one bite of his meal left, Petersen told him to hand over whatever remained anyway, the charges said.”

Speaking of charges: From WDIO-TV up in Duluth: “Forty-six-year-old Bruce Wayne Cameron was arrested in June of 2015 and had been charged with intentional second-degree murder. The charge came in the death of Leona Mary Maslowski, who was 83 when she was killed in her Virginia apartment in 1987. Cameron’s public defender argued that Cameron’s confession was coerced, and that he was allegedly mislead into believing he would only face juvenile charges. On Friday, Judge David Ackerson threw out the confession as inadmissible … .”

La Belle Vie (the space) lives again. In the Strib, Rick Nelson writes, “On the one-year anniversary of the day that La Belle Vie closed its doors, out came the news that the high-profile address has landed a new tenant. He’s chef Don Saunders of the four-year-old Kenwood and he has big plans for the space, which is located on the ground floor of the patrician 510 Groveland condominium in Minneapolis.” 

Folks, it isn’t that expensive. Tim Nelson’s MPR story on freeloaders on the LRT says, “Fare evasion on Metro Transit’s light rail lines may have doubled in the last two years in some areas of the service. That’s according to a new audit estimating how many people are riding without valid proof of paying. It heads for the Metropolitan Council’s audit committee on Wednesday. The audit estimated fare evasion at between 7.6 percent and 11.8 percent on the Blue Line from downtown Minneapolis to the airport and Mall of America, up from 2.6 percent to 3.6 percent in 2014. … Evasion on the Green Line, which opened in 2014 between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, rose from between 4.6 percent to 9 percent in 2014 up to between 8.4 and 10.8 percent this year.”

Meanwhile, at the Dakota Access site, the AP says, “The scores of people who set up a new camp of tents and teepees on private land in North Dakota to protest the Dakota Access oil pipeline won’t immediately be removed, the local sheriff’s office said Monday. The Morton County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t currently ‘have the manpower’ to remove the more than 100 protesters from the property along the pipeline route, spokeswoman Donnell Preskey told The Associated Press.” They do know “winter is coming,” right?

Wells Fargo Watch. Now we’re talking the kind of thing that gets shareholder attention. At Fortune, Lucinda Shen writes, “When news of Wells Fargo’s phony account scandal first broke, the bank, analysts, and even investors thought it wouldn’t dent earnings. But as the furor surrounding the opening of some 2 million deposit and credit card accounts without consumer knowledge at Wells Fargo continued to mount, the mega-bank’s reputation began to plummet — and more than a few customers began jumping off the wagon. As a result, Wells could lose as much as $212 billion in deposits and $8 billion in revenue over the next year and a half, according to a study done by consulting firm cg42.”