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Sept. 13, 2017 UPSP 213-200 Vol. 153, No. 16
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Former paramedic pleads guilty to stealing pain-killing drugs, replacing vials with water
Gallatin to honor Lola and Kenneth Critten
Crittens to lead parade this Chautauqua Saturday Kenneth and Lola Critten will lead the 2017 Chautauqua parade in Gallatin at 5 p.m. this Saturday as the honored grand marshals. Thus, this couple embellishes the list of honorees saluted by this community since parade grand marshals were first recognized in 1989. The Critten family’s prominence in annuls of Daviess County is secure in multiple ways. Their family business, Landmark Manufacturing, is a leading employer in this region and delivers world-class metal fabrication products and expertise to domestic and international destinations. Likewise, the family’s farming operations not only hearken to a Century Farm heritage but offer evidence of cutting edge advances in crop production and management practices. In many ways, and now at the parade during this weekend’s Chautauqua, the Crittens are leaders. This couple, newlyweds some 50 years ago, are renowned for their hard work and “can do” spirit and willingness to help others. If their story is not unique in defining American character, then their story is certainly unusual. To understand why you find a factory with over 3 acres under roof in the middle of a corn field, or why a 50-million gallon water impoundment is underway as a sort of retirement project, you need to know Kenny and Lola personally. Their optimism defies hardships and challenges. Their success is evidenced by many measures. And, even in retirement, their interests and outlook always target the future.
Tom Larson, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a former paramedic with two Northwest Missouri ambulance districts pleaded guilty in federal court yesterday, Sept. 12, to stealing pain-killing drugs and replacing the vials with water. Joseph L. Comstock, 31, of Bethany, waived his right to a grand jury. He pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Beth Phillips to a federal information that charges him with three counts of tampering with a consumer product (fentanyl and morphine) with reckless disregard for the risk that another person would be placed in danger of death or bodily injury, and under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to such risk. By pleading guilty, Comstock admitted that he emptied vials of morphine and fentanyl, taking it for his own personal use, and replaced the pain-killing drugs with sterilized water. Comstock tampered with the
drug vials while working at both the NTA Ambulance District in Bethany and the Community Ambulance District of Daviess County in Gallatin, during 2014 and 2015. Comstock started tampering with drugs in March 2014, following a medical procedure to remove his tonsils. He accessed drugs on ambulances and was able to bend up the lid of the plastic boxes and dump out the drugs he wished to tamper with. He obtained both fentanyl and morphine from ambulances and replaced the drugs with sterile water. Comstock admitted there were at least two occasions where he personally treated patients with drugs he knew he had tampered with. These patients were both hip fracture patients that were supposed to receive fentanyl but instead received sterile water that Comstock had replaced in the vial. Federal officials were notified on March 4, 2015, of possible drug tampering at the NTA Am-
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Horrendous Hurricane Irma a near-miss for Amy (Woodruff) LaBrie and family Gallatin R-5 alumnus Amy Woodruff LaBrie lives in Miami, FL, with her husband, Keith, and young daughter, Sara. Amy kept a journal as they waited for Hurricane Irma to pass. Irma disrupted, and contin-
ues to affect the lives of millions of people from the Caribbean islands and now up through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina as it continues to move north as a tropical depression. Here is Amy’s narrative:
A family affair, with roots and wings
Kenneth Critten’s great-grandfather homesteaded the farm where Lola and Kenny reside today. His grandparents, Otto and Gertrude Critten, worked this farm and raised a family of seven boys and one girl. One of these was Kenneth’s father, Wayne, who built and then mass-produced Longwood furnaces. “My dad built the first Longwood after trying electric heat,” Kenny says. “It was an invention of necessity. Our farm house had poor windows and no insulation so electric heat had no chance of working.” The Crittens weren’t the only ones looking for better ways to heat homes. The Crittens tinkered and adjusted their woodburning furnaces. Business grew, mostly promoted by word-ofmouth testimonies. But farming was always Kenny’s priority. He was running a dairy at age 14. Even though his father didn’t milk, Kenny managed to find time to play some football for GHS, but there was no time for basketball or other schoolboy pastimes. Kenny worked. Lola’s ties to Daviess County begin with grandparents who raised her mother on a farm along Route K. Her father grew up near Braymer. After marriage, Lola’s parents moved to Kansas City until returning to live near Jameson when Lola was in the third grade. As teenagers, Lola met Kenny in an unusual way. Unknown to each other, both Lola and Kenny rode or drove a Volkswagen. The cars were similar colors so that in the dark you couldn’t easily tell one vehicle from the other. Soon Lola, riding with her older sister, began to be stopped by sheriff deputies and state troopers for various reasons. Lola says this happened so frequently she made the effort to find out more about this Kenny Critten. A romance bloomed. The couple married on Aug. 30, 1964. “I wasn’t a model child,” Kenny says with a grin. “But everything worked out. Nobody around here worked much on Volkswagens, and I even wound up taking care of the VW repairs
bulance District in Bethany. The chief of EMS reported that an employee had noticed two morphine syringes had broken tamper-evident seals. On Jan. 30, 2015, an employee noticed that two morphine syringes had broken tamperevident seals. On Feb. 27, 2015, ambulance employees looked through narcotic boxes kept on the three NTA ambulances. They found a number of drugs that were missing tamper-evidence caps and had broken tamper-evident seals, including midazolam, lorazepam, morphine and fentanyl. Federal agents installed surveillance equipment at the Bethany NTA building on March 18, 2015. A camera was also placed on an ambulance, which was taken out of service. Comstock was recorded on the surveillance video as he stole morphine from the ambulance on two separate occasions on March 19 and March 23, 2015. Comstock later admitted that
GHS Golf Coach Chad Sullenger with MSHSAA’s Greg Stahl
Sullenger a MSHSAA Coach of the Year The Missouri State High School Athletics Association staff has selected Gallatin’s Chad Sullenger as the National Federation of State High School Associations Coach of the Year for all classes of boys’ golf from the 2016-17 school year. The award was presented to Chad during halftime of Friday’s home football game by Greg Stahl. Criteria for the award includes good character and integrity, display of sportsmanship, support of MSHSAA bylaws and NFHS rules, and evidence of success and administering a successful program. Coach Sullenger led the Bulldogs to the MSHSAA Class 1 Championship last spring.
Wind had circled the courtyard outside Sara’s second-story window all night, but this squall was different. The thin palm trees moaned as they swayed, and leafy bushes shuddered as they were slammed against the interior corner of the cement building. Sheets of small drops of rain pelted the double-thick panes of glass that separated our family from the wrath of what was touted as the strongest hurricane to hit south Florida since Wilma in 2005. The time was 4 a.m. on Sunday and the worst of Hurricane Irma was hitting our apartment two hours earlier than the meteorologists had predicted. The clack of the exterior screen against the glass window above my head had startled me awake. The red hue of the bedroom told me that we had progressed through the colors on the television’s radar maps. We had passed the lime green bands of rain, and the orange tropical storm winds with tornadoes were in our past. Now we were beginning the six-hour window of the heaviest hurricaneforce winds and rain. I felt apprehensive about continuing to lay under our four-foot square window, but my husband, Keith, our four-month-old daughter, and Bella the cat were peacefully asleep, so I put my arm around Sara and held on tight for the next 20 hours. No one in our Doral, FL, apartment had experienced a Category 5 hurricane, including (continued on page 15)
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