Senate passes bill to prevent sale of meth ingredients
Megan Jula
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Megan Jula
Prescribing other drugs to a recovering drug addict may initially seem counter-intuitive.
Constance Rodenbarger has grappled with mental illness her entire life. In second grade, she was diagnosed with clinical depression.
SOUTH BEND — In a precedent-setting case, a Granger, Ind., woman was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison for aborting her pregnancy in her home and leaving the baby’s body in a dumpster.
SOUTH BEND — Purvi Patel, 33, was sentenced today to 20 years in prison on charges of feticide and neglect of a dependent.
Purvi Patel’s premature fetus was found in a dumpster behind the Moe’s Southwest Grill her family owns in Mishawaka, Ind.
The IU Student Foundation is replacing Little Fifty, the running relay counterpart to the Little 500 bike race, with a 5-kilometer race ?this year.
An infant dies every 13 hours in Indiana.
Students listen when other students talk about preventing sexual violence.
Somewhere amid a muddle of leases and landlords, you are trying to figure out the logistics of renting.
Donna MacLafferty was falling asleep when the phone rang at 11 p.m. It was her ex-husband, asking about their son.
An IU Notify alert sent early Thursday morning contained the notification system’s first error, IU police said.
A tweet sent by IU sophomore Christa Kabbes was simply supposed to help her donate to IU Dance Marathon.
By Megan Jula
The kitchen clock strikes midnight, and the schoolteacher is halfway finished making spicy chocolate ice pops.
Stacks of cardboard surrounded the volunteers in the basement room of the La Casa Latino Cultural Center.
Parking prices at the Indiana Memorial Union parking lots increased by a nickel this August. From 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, parking rates are now $2.00 per half hour.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The pansy planting crew worked in rhythm, a synchronization of sweat, shovels and the occasional wisecrack. Dirt caked on rough hands as the crew placed the delicate flowers the Friday before spring break.Nursery assistant supervisor Chuck Burleson threw aside a shovelful of earth — “You got to have a good back” — creating a hole in the flowerbed on Seventh Street and Woodlawn Avenue.In went three pansies, the first flowers to be planted this spring at IU. No ceremony, just part of the job.But it had been a long cold winter while they waited to plant; checking for snow and whether the ground had thawed, knowing when the next frost would come and if night temperatures would drop. These flowers were the first of more than 20,000 pansies planted by the IU Nursery crew to greet students returning from spring break.“We hope that they enjoy them,” nursery manager Marshall Goss said. “It helps them feel as if spring is here and that school’s nearly finished.”Arranging these rows of flowers is an art. The spacing has to be eyeballed or judged with a work boot. They can be in candy cane stripes or checkered, the pattern carefully planned. Burleson and his crew were satisfied with this bed. The pansies marched in even rows, shocking spots of color against a backdrop of grey and brown.“It’s love,” he said. “They’re perfect.” He nudged a plant a bit too close to another. “Well, almost perfect.”***This morning as students walk back on campus, some will notice the pansies that now paint IU from Assembly Hall to Sample Gates. Others will undoubtedly trample the flowers.“We love working when the students are gone,” Burleson said.The entire crop, about 7,000 more pansies, will be planted by Tuesday, Goss said.For seven weeks prior they grew in IU greenhouses. The pansies stretched like a living carpet through the conservatory: violet, creamy yellow, apricot, burgundy, white and royal purple. “You open the door and you go, ‘Wow,’” Goss said. “It’s a lot of color.”Goss began working with IU Nursery in 1983, while he was coaching IU’s track and field team. He’s 75 years old now. Goss has cared for the plants since January, when they were less than half an inch tall. He watered them, fertilized them and monitored their temperature. If the temperature is too warm, pansies get “leggy,” he said, and sprawl out of their pots.Goss shook a plant to demonstrate its firm roots. “That’s an excellent plant right now,” he said. “We’re proud of our crop this year.”Usually, they grow for six weeks, but this year weather delayed planting. The crew worried there wouldn’t be flowers in the ground before the first day of spring.“We just don’t know what the weather is going to do in Indiana,” he said. “We put them out just about as fast as we can.”Pansies are the first flower planted each spring because of their hardiness and because they will be in bloom during graduation. “It’s a competition,” Goss said. “Try to make your campus look better than somebody else’s.”Goss estimated one pot with three pansies costs $1 to raise. With 27,000 pansies, that’s $9,000 for the crop. “They do cost something to put them out and take care of them,” he said. “But I think every dollar put out is dollars reaped back by the quality of student that you get.”Goss said the positive feedback they receive from students and visitors is reassuring.“That causes us to swell our chest out,” he said. “We want people to be envious of us.” ***Burleson remembers when only he and nursery supervisor Bruce Cabanaw did all of the spring planting for IU. That was back when he first started with the nursery, about fifteen years ago. This spring, the seven members of the planting crew range in age from their 20s to 70s.“The older you get, the harder it gets,” Campus Division employee Steve Webb said. He rose from planting, his knees protected by pads. The guys call him “Curly,” he added, raising a red IU cap to display his shiny bald head. His silver tooth glinted in the sun as he smiled. Sometimes he is also known as “Grills.”The members of the crew all have nicknames for each other, but said some are too inappropriate for them to explain, like 74-year-old Marvin “Mouse” Ducharme.“We’ve got the best crew on campus,” Burleson said. They were gathered in a half circle around the Seventh and Woodlawn Streets bed. “I love you Chuckie bear,” Zach Humphrey said, hugging Burleson. Humphrey is a 24-year-old full-time employee, who said Burleson is a professional.“A dying breed,” Burleson said, shaking his head pointedly at Humphrey.***Sometimes it’s a thankless job, Burleson said. The crew will start by tilling the ground to break up the soil, make a run to the nursery to get more flowers and find the students have walked through their work.There’s nothing worse than digging through dirt packed down by a bunch of feet, Burleson said.“It’s not all fun and games,” he said. “Students come back through and tear it all up.” That especially happens in the direction of Kilroy’s Bar and Grill, Webb added.Despite the inevitable destruction of their handiwork, the pain of the planting with muscles that haven’t been used all winter and the unpredictability of the weather, it’s their favorite time of year.“There is nothing neater than to see snow on them, have it melt off and then there’s the flower,” Burleson said.Each year after the spring planting is finished, Burleson and Cabanaw drive through campus to see the flowers.There are still weeks of work to go this spring, but the pansies are a start.Burleson leaned on his shovel and scratched his salt-and-pepper beard, looking at the first signs of spring.“You can’t beat the flowers,” he said.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Jeremy Parks was hanging Disney decorations for his daughter Josie’s seventh birthday party on Saturday when he heard the screaming. Two children, neighbors, were at the front door of the Parks family’s Indianapolis home, crying out for someone to save three children who had fallen through the ice in a nearby pond.“We need help,” Parks recalled them saying. “They’re going to die.”Parks, a 33-year-old mechanic, ran out in his slippers to a large retention pond along the 6800 block of Devinney Lane in southwest Marion County. As he approached the pond, Parks saw 11-year-old Jaylen Bland pulling himself out of the water. Jaylen, who is Park’s second cousin, was shaking and crying. “Don’t worry about that, don’t look at them,’” Parks remembers saying to Jaylen. “Go home, get warm, tell your grandma to call 911.”Christina Bland, Jaylen’s mother, later said the boys were carelessly playing around on the half-inch thick ice, sliding farther and farther out until it broke.Parks, a father of four, recognized the two other boys in the water: brothers Rodrigo and Pablo Jimenez, who he thinks are about 8 and 6. They often rode their bikes up and down his street. The older boy, Rodrigo, was swimming enough to keep his head afloat in the football field-size, 35-foot deep pond. Pablo was flopping around about 30 feet from the bank.“One moment he was on his back with his mouth open, the next moment he was on his stomach,” Parks said.Parks stepped onto the ice in socks, thermal underwear, jeans and a T-shirt.He fell into the water as he put his full weight on the ice. Survival instinct kicked in, he said, and he swam back to shore. “I kind of kick myself in the butt for that,” Parks said.Thinking quickly, he found a stick about six feet long to pull in Rodrigo. He laid down, his torso flat against the ice, and after several attempts was able to pull the older boy to safety on land.“I thought no, this time he is coming back with me,” he said. He reassured a panicking Rodrigo that he would save his brother, too. By then, neighbors were starting to gather. One tried to reach Pablo, but she, also, fell through the ice.With a neighbor’s broom in his hand, Parks edged on his hands and knees toward Pablo. “You could see the blueness in his lips, in his hands,” he said. “He couldn’t even grab a hold of the broom handle when I put it right in his hand.”Parks could hear the ice underneath him cracking. Knowing he had to reach the boy before the ice gave out, Parks lunged into the water. He was able to grab Pablo, who was conscious but not responding, and swim back with one hand. But with ice in the way and weighed down by the boy and wet clothes, he wasn’t making much progress until a neighbor threw him a garden hose. To grab the hose, he had to let go of Pablo. The boy began to sink, and Parks grabbed him again. At this point, his legs were numb, Parks said. Neighbors pulled him in by the hose, using his body to break through the ice like a battering ram. Ten feet from the edge, he couldn’t hold on any longer. “The hose and the boy came out of my hand,” Parks said.Struggling to breathe, Parks realized he was starting to drown. It was a situation where seconds seem like minutes, Parks said.But with one last surge of adrenaline, he latched onto the hose, grabbed Pablo, and was pulled to land by his neighbors. Immediately, a neighbor gave Pablo CPR and carried him to paramedics who were just arriving on the street.According to a Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division press release, Pablo initially appeared to be in good condition when transported to Riley Hospital for Children. He was released Sunday evening. The other boys were released at the scene.When Parks fell trying to walk, his neighbors carried him.“Just take me home,” Parks said. After 10 minutes inside his living room, he began to shake from the cold. Paramedics were treating Jaylen in Parks’s son’s bedroom. “You could have put a wooden stick in my mouth,” Parks said, laughing, “and I would have chewed it up.” But, he added, he decided he didn’t need to go to the hospital like the paramedics suggested to treat hypothermia. Christina Bland said Jaylen is doing well other than a few scrapes. She was on her way to pick up her son and daughter from her mom’s house in the neighborhood when she got a call about the accident.“To hear that your child fell, knowing that it’s winter and it’s icy, there’s a lot of danger involved,” she said. “Thank God Jeremy was there and he responded the way he did, because you know it could have been all three of them gone.”Sunday evening, after Pablo was released, the Jimenez family stopped by to thank Parks with a gift basket and beer. “I don’t have to swim for you now,” Parks said as he hugged Pablo.The night before as he tried to salvage Josie’s birthday, Parks said he couldn’t stop thinking about Pablo.“I got a kid that’s close to his age,” Parks said. “If he had died, I’d have just sat here with a big burden on my shoulders thinking what I could have done differently. I hope I never have to experience anything like that again. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat if I had to.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The renovated restaurant smelled of a fresh coat of paint and new lumber.Gray stone waterfalls hung on wood-paneled walls that betrayed no traces of smoke damage.The sushi bar had moved from the right to the left side, but the Japanese-Korean restaurant Japonee looked much the same as it had before a three-alarm fire damaged the building in 2012.Landlord Han Chong adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses, enthusiastically explaining the new additions — a hibachi grill on a new second floor, high ceilings, large flat screen televisions, French-influenced Japanese food. He plans to open in March. “I hope it just at least goes back to the business we had before,” Chong said. “That’s all we’re hoping.”***Server Lilay Cai worked at Japanee for three days before flames engulfed the restaurant on 320 N. Walnut St.On the morning of Sept. 24, 2012, electrical wiring in a refrigerator sparked a fire in the kitchen, Chong said. Though the Bloomington Fire Department contained the fire itself, smoke and water caused damage throughout the restaurant.BFD Chief Roger Kerr confirmed the fire was completely accidental and no one was injured.Cai heard about the fire while walking to her 11:15 a.m. class through a text from co-owner Janice Zhan, wife of co-owner Jian Zhang “Charlie” Shi.“I thought it was a joke,” she said. “I reread it three times.”Less than a decade after opening and less than a year after a $250,000 renovation, the restaurant was closed temporarily.“I was shocked,” Chong said. “I was just thinking about insurance.”When Cai went to pick up her check at the charred location, the sign reading “Japanee” was covered in ashes.***Within the three days she worked there, Cai said she had established friendships with couples who ate regularly at the restaurant.“It was super popular,” she said, explaining she often saw students she recognized from class.In April, Cai received a call from Japanee owner Bokang Park asking her if she would be interested in working at two new sister companies, Sake Bar and Japonee Express.She said she enjoys working there and hopes to add shifts at the remodeled restaurant, which will be called Japonee rather than Japanee.“It was part of Bloomington,” Chong said of the original restaurant. “A lot of people really liked our restaurant. Now everyone is asking ‘When will you open again?’”***The Bloomington Plan Commission approved the addition of a second story and a 4,800 square feet extension to what was left of Japanee in June 2013. At the time, Chong said he hoped the construction would be finished within five months. He tentatively planned to open in August of that year.“We waited to get started,” he said of the delay. “We don’t want to open until it’s ready.”Chong envisions a gradual opening of Japonee within the next couple of weeks, with the new upstairs hibachi grill opening after the main floor sushi bar.Chong and Park, who are both Korean, said they look forward to the grill the most. One new menu item is a type of marinated beef called kalbi, which Park described as Korean barbeque.Remodeling and adding the second story for the hibachi grill cost more than $1 million, Chong added. The repair of the original back part of the building — costing more than $2 million dollars — was covered by insurance.The remolded restaurant also boasts a new sprinkler system, Chong said.At the time of the fire, the building did not have a sprinkler system, Chief Kerr said, which was legal because of when the building was built.Chong’s goal is for the restaurant to be both modern and reminiscent of the original Japanee. He said he designed the new restaurant layout himself in a couple of weeks.“I don’t want people to come here and not recognize Japanee,” he said. “I want it to have half the feel of the old restaurant, half a new ambiance.”***Park’s dark gray jacket was covered in construction dust as he walked through his restaurant.“The roof, wall, ceiling is new,” Park said, looking around in satisfaction. “The floor is original.”He said he isn’t thinking about being excited for the opening yet. “It’s business,” he added with a laugh.In a matter of weeks, sushi and sake will be brought to one of the more than 100 seats in the restaurant.“It’s neat to see they didn’t give up on the lot location or the building,” Kerr said. “Now they’ve made it bigger and better. It’s a success story out of something that was very devastating initially and now they’re turning it around.”