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Capitol Stormer Arrested in Fatal Crash
Written by DOYLE MURPHY
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Eily ernande , fil ed a year ago parading the shards of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s nameplate through the U.S. Capitol, was arrested in Franklin County on the anniversary of the attack on suspicion of drunkenly killing a woman in a car crash.
Hernandez, 22 of Sullivan, was going the wrong way about 7 p.m. this January 6 on Interstate 44 near St. Clair, driving a Volkswagen Passat west in the eastbound lanes when she collided with a Buick Enclave, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The Buick’s passenger, 32-year-old Victoria Wilson of St. Clair, was killed. Her husband, Ryan Wilson, 36, was injured and taken to Missouri Baptist Medical Center.
Victoria Wilson was a mother of two, according to a GoFundMe page created to help the family pay for her funeral. The post says her husband would need surgery.
Hernandez, who was also injured, was taken to Mercy Hospital. The highway patrol arrested her on charges of driving while intoxicated resulting in death and driving while intoxicated resulting in serious physical injury.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch first reported Hernandez’s connection to the Capitol riots. Her attorney in that case, Ethan Corlija, told the newspaper he had visited her in the hospital and that the crash was a “tragic event.”
“My heart goes out to the other motorist who lost their life and family,” Corlija told the daily.
Hernandez pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the Capitol case on Monday. She was charged in January 2021 and allowed to remain free as her case proceeded, a common arrangement in the Capitol cases with low-level charges. She was part of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the building on January 6, 2021, as rioters sought to overturn the results of the presidential election. Members of Congress were forced into hiding for hours as the intruders threatened to kill lawmakers, including Vice President Mike Pence and Pelosi. Footage from the scene showed Hernandez gleefully carrying Pelosi’s broken nameplate through the Capitol after members of the mob ransacked congressional offices.
Five people died in connection with the attack, and more than 700 people have been charged in the year since. Hernandez reportedly rode to the rally with her uncle, William Merry, and his friend, Paul Westover. All three were fil ed together alongside rioters. Merry and Westover have already pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. n
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Emily Hernandez on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. | DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Hernandez was charged in January 2021 with five misdemeanors and allowed to remain free as her case proceeded.
BJC Cancels Elective Surgeries as COVID-19 Surges in Missouri
Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI
Overwhelmed by rising COVID-19 cases, BJC HealthCare announced last week that it was postponing all elective surgeries effective January 6.
The hospital system is contending with more than 500 COVID-19 cases, leaving nurses and staff “stretched to their limits” amid a wave of infections that’s seen the St. Louis region break case records in recent days.
“This is beyond anything we’ve seen thus far in the pandemic,” a hospital spokesperson said in a news release. “This decision was not made lightly and reflects our current challenge as cases continue to rise and resources continue to be strained.”
The news release noted that patients with procedures scheduled “that are not considered urgent” will be contacted by a staff member about postponing.
The announcement arrives as COVID-19 cases have risen to unprecedented levels. On January 4, the day before BJC’s announcement, St. Louis area hospitals reported more than 1,000 cases. The wave is slamming into health systems across Missouri and surrounding states: Dr. Steven M. Brown, who manages more than 100 ICU patients as part of Mercy’s Virtual Care Center in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, tweeted that he is caring for dozens of seriously ill unvaccinated patients.
“If they are conscious, most are struggling to breathe,” he wrote, urging people to be vaccinated before they are infected. “The rest are life support in drug-induced comas.”
The numbers aren’t just going up in large metro areas like St. Louis and Kansas City. Saint Louis University professor Chris Prener, who tracks and analyzes COVID cases, wrote last week that the “outstate” region is starting to see an increase as well, and that the trend is “higher than it has been at any point since last January.” n
BJC sta ers are “stretched to their limits,” says the hospital system. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI
Tracking Narcan Use in St. Louis
Written by RYAN KRULL
New data made available to the RFT show that the St. Louis Fire Department deployed the nasal spray Narcan 10,249 times from the start of 2018 to the end of 2021. Narcan, an “opioid antagonist,” reverses an opioid overdose, bringing the overdosing person back to consciousness and stopping the potentially deadly depression of respiratory function brought on by drugs like Fentanyl.
Records from the fire department, which tracks Narcan deployment by ZIP code, show that the 63111 ZIP code saw 1,016 deployments of Narcan by firefighters and EMT workers over the past four years, the most of any ZIP code where the department administered the drug. 63111 contains the Patch and Carondelet neighborhoods in the southern tip of St. Louis.
The 63115 area code, containing Penrose, Mark Twain and parts of several other north city neighborhoods, had the second most deployments of Narcan in that same period with 992.
More than half of the fire department’s Narcan deployments occurred in six ZIP codes in the southeast and northeast edges of the city: roughly, south of Arsenal and east of Kingshighway, and north of Page between Kingshighway and Highway 70. The fire department administered Narcan in a total of 31 zip codes, many of which are outside city limits.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, which began carrying Narcan in 2018, deployed significantly fewer doses of the drug than firefighters and EMTs. The department does not track individual Narcan deployments but does track refill requests, of which there have only been 50 in the past four years.
Addressing the disparity of Narcan deployments between police and emergency services, SLMPD police spokesperson Evita Caldwell explained, “patrol supervisors are using their discretion to reassign [overdose] calls to EMS when necessary” and this rerouting to EMS is “a trend that has increased over time.”
The fire department’s 10,249 deployments of Narcan do not include the unknown number of doses administered by librarians, social workers and coffee shop baristas who have in many cases taken it upon themselves to be trained with and carry the life-saving drug.
Indeed, overdose cases can happen anywhere: In May of last year, Delanie Muenchen was at a staff meeting at Kitchen House Coffee, which at the time had a location in the Patch, when she and other coworkers noticed a man collapsed at a table outside.
Muenchen, who recently completed a master’s in social work at Saint Louis University and volunteers with Tent Mission STL, ran a few blocks to her apartment, got Narcan and made it back to the barely breathing man in time to administer a life-saving dose.
“I encourage everyone to carry Narcan,” Muenchen says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been somewhere it was needed.”
Narcan is currently available at Walgreens, CVS and other drug stores without a prescription, though it must be purchased from the pharmacist. n
Six ZIP codes accounted for most the fire department’s Narcan calls. | THEO WELLING
The Seal of Approval
Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI
Like the dive-bombing bald eagle in its (sort of) center, the official seal of St. Francois County seems out of place in so many ways — and for days, thousands of internet strangers have delighted in cataloging them.
And can you blame them? There’s the jumble of images hilariously oriented to fit (mostly) within the blue border; above it, the formatting for the text of “The Great Seal of St. Francois County” appears to be trying to lift off and escape from the rest of the seal; and just looking at the thing for more than a few seconds produces a kind of seasick nausea, because this seal is an *experience* — and that experience is chaos.
And lest one presume this is just some .jpg floating around on the county website, please be advised: It’s real, it’s official and it’s spectacular.
However, while the internet’s attention on the seal is new, the seal itself is not. As reported in the Park Hills Daily Journal, the seal was unveiled during a 2018 State of the County address delivered by its creator, Presiding Commissioner Harold Gallaher, who took credit for the design during his speech: “With some simple software I brought up this new one, and we’ve adopted that now as our county seal.”
Three years later, St. Francois County could be getting a new seal. Gallaher, who is still Commissioner and in his 70s, addressed a St. Francois County Commission in a regular meeting last week. He acknowledged a “fever pitch on social media about the county seal” and announced that the county is looking at ways to redesign his self-admittedly slapdash work.
“It was a rush deal way back when,” he said, according to the Journal’s account of Tuesday’s meeting. “I had two days for the public to come up with a seal and my design is proof positive that I am not artistically inclined.”
But while his graphic design skills may have lacked technical polish, the result captivated internet users who could only look at the seal, squint, and wonder — how is this real?
On Reddit, the seal hit the site’s front page over the weekend. Days later, user wtf703 was kind enough to completely redesign the seal so the eagle isn’t tipping into an abyss; the redesign made the Bible/cross combo even more pronounced, because this designer is a complete pro who understands what their customer wants.
It wasn’t just Reddit getting in on the fun: On Twitter, many users responded with references to the “Graphic Design Is My Passion” meme. But no web community leaped more exuberantly into redesigning the seal than the good weirdos at Fark, where users created an array of updated seals — several involving novel interpretations of the word “seal” — that both capture the spirit of the original while also being, somehow, even worse.
But if St. Francois citizens are hoping for the official redesign to turn out any better, they may have to put their hopes into yet another amateur: During Tuesday’s commission meeting, the Journal reported that Gallaher stated he didn’t want any tax money spent on the redesign — and instead, a contest will be organized in the coming weeks.
“I would like it to be better than the seal we have now,” he said, “which would be a slam dunk.” n
