SEDGWICK COUNTY — Law enforcement agencies in Kansas have been investigating the confiscation of counterfeit Oxycodone pills.

Authorities seized the suspected Oxycodone pills through forensic testing they were determined to be counterfeit, according to Sheriff Jeff Easter. The pills contained Fentanyl, a potentially fatal synthetic drug.

The counterfeit pills appear from their markings to be legitimate Oxycodone pills; however after undergoing forensic testing, they are confirmed to contain Fentanyl instead of the ingredients of authentic Oxycodone.

The KBI has also published information about the seizures of counterfeit Oxycodone pills in counties surrounding Sedgwick County.

The sheriff’s department cautioned, “if you come across any blue pills with the imprint M/30 please handle the pills as little as possible and seal them in plastic bag as soon as you can. While the pills may not present as high a risk to anyone when the pills are whole, the recovery of these items in crushed/powder or half pill form will pose a risk hazard if any Fentanyl within the binding material becomes airborne. The counterfeit pills that have been submitted to the lab appear lighter in color and may have speckles of colors to include tinges of green and blue.”

Federal, State, and Local Law Enforcement Agencies have all reported encountering these counterfeit pills. Many of these pills are being manufactured and shipped by the Mexican drug cartels.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has a potency of 50 to 100 times higher than morphine.

Morphine is a naturally occurring substance derived from the opium poppy plant often used to alleviate pain.

The quantity of Fentanyl in these counterfeit pills varies. The presence of these synthetic opioids in the drug market has led to a higher overdose rate and deaths.

The sheriff’s department encouraged parents to speak with their children and share this information with them about this potentially fatal drug.

SEDGWICK COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating a fatal Tuesday shooting and have made an arrest.

Just after 2:30a.m. police responded to a shooting inside a former tire warehouse in 3000 Block of South Hillside in Wichita, according to Captain Brent Allred.

At the scene officers found a 41-year-old man with a single gunshot wound and he was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Allred.

Police also spoke to a 45-year-old woman identified as Stacey Peters of Haysville at the scene. Peters was leasing space in the building to sell items online, according Allred.

Through interviews, recovering a gun at the scene and reviewing evidence, investigators learned Peters and the man were in a relationship, and while at the location, Peters fired a handgun at the victim striking him.

Late Tuesday, police reported they had arrested Peters on one count of 2nd-degree murder, according to officer Charley Davidson. As of early Wednesday, no bond for Peters had been reported.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ambassador Gordon Sondland, the most anticipated witness in the impeachment inquiry, will confront questions Wednesday about his evolving accounts of the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine and a newly revealed summertime phone call with President Donald Trump.

Watch the hearing

Sondland, a wealthy hotelier Trump tapped as his ambassador to the European Union, is more directly entangled than any witness yet in the Republican president’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden and Democrats in the 2016 election. Yet Sondland already has amended his testimony once — “I now do recall,” he said, talking to Ukraine about investigations.

Sondland’s appearance at Wednesday morning’s hearing, and his closeness to Trump, is of particular concern to the White House as the historic impeachment inquiry reaches closer to the president, pushing through an intense week with nine witnesses testifying over three days in back-to-back sessions.

Trump has recently tried to suggest that he barely knows his hand-picked ambassador, but Sondland has said he has spoken several times with the president and was acting on his direction.

The envoy is likely to face tough questions from lawmakers of both parties about Trump’s July 25 call when he asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for the political investigations at the same time as U.S. military aid for the ally was being stalled.

Sondland routinely bragged about his proximity to Trump and drew alarm from the foreign service and national security apparatus as part of an irregular channel of diplomacy led by the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Last week State Department official David Holmes revealed one of those interactions to impeachment investigators, saying he recalled it “vividly.”

The political counselor was having lunch with Sondland in Kyiv when the ambassador dialed up the president on his cellphone and Holmes could hear Trump’s voice.

“I then heard President Trump ask, quote, ‘So he’s going to do the investigation?’” Holmes testified. “Ambassador Sondland replied that ‘He’s going to do it,’ adding that President Zelensky will, quote, ‘do anything you ask him to.’”

Sondland was known for telling others “he was in charge of Ukraine” despite being the U.S. envoy in Brussels, said another witness in the impeachment probe, former White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill.

“And I asked, well, on whose authority?” said Hill, who will testify Thursday. “And he said, the President.”

Sondland’s appearance follows the testimony Tuesday of four national security and diplomatic officials, including a career Army officer who described Trump’s call with Zelenskiy as “improper.”

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman told lawmakers it was his “duty” to report his concerns about the call, as he deflected Republican attacks, including from the White House on his loyalty and career in public service.

It wasn’t the first time Vindman had registered his concerns over Ukraine policy. He testified about a July 10 meeting at the White House when Sondland told visiting Ukraine officials they would need to “deliver” before the administration would agree to a meeting Zelenskiy wanted with Trump.

“Ambassador Sondland referred to investigations into the Bidens and Burisma in 2016,” Vindman testified, referring to the gas company on whose board Hunter Biden had a seat.

At the White House, Trump said he had watched part of the day’s testimony and slammed the ongoing impeachment hearings as a “disgrace.” Over the weekend, Trump assailed Williams as part of the “Never Trumpers” who oppose his presidency, though there is no indication she has shown any partisanship.

Former National Security Council official Timothy Morrison told investigators that he witnessed a key September conversation in Warsaw between Sondland and a top aide to Zelenskiy. Afterward, Sondland said he had relayed to the Ukrainian that U.S. aid might be freed if the country would announce the investigations, Morrison testified.

Another diplomat, former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, shifted his own account of the July 10 meeting to say Sondland did, in fact, discuss investigations with the visiting Ukrainians.

“I think all of us thought it was inappropriate; the conversation did not continue and the meeting concluded,” Volker said.

A series of text messages Volker provided to lawmakers showed conversations between him, Sondland and other leaders in which they discussed a need for Ukraine to launch investigations, including into Burisma.

Volker said meeting with Giuliani was just part of the dialogue, and he had one in-person meeting with him, in which Giuliani “raised, and I rejected, the conspiracy theory that Vice President Biden would have been influenced in his duties as vice president by money paid to his son.”

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GOVE COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 10:30p.m. Tuesday in Gove County.

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2019 Kenworth semi driven by Robery Leon Hunsaker, 54, Thornton, Colorado, was westbound on Interstate 70 just east of Castle Rock Road.

The semi struck a Chevy Silverado driven by Hugo Gonzales, 52, Wheat Ridge, CO., in the right lane. The Silverado was pushed across the westbound lanes and into the guard rail, caught fire and was completely destroyed.

Gonzales Schmidt Funeral Home of Quinter. Hunsaker was not injured. The KHP did not have complete information on seat belt usage.

By JOHN HANNA and ROXANA HEGEMAN

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Kris Kobach isn’t fazed that fellow Republicans worry he’s unpopular or too brash in pushing his hard-right views to keep Kansas’ open Senate seat in GOP hands next year.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others are so concerned that they’ve spent months urging Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman, to step down as U.S. secretary of state and run for the seat Republican Sen. Pat Roberts is leaving. Pompeo in the race would make it far more difficult for Kobach to win the GOP primary in August.

But Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, isn’t softening his rhetoric or putting less focus on the tough immigration policies that built his national profile. He’s tripling down — and deriding critics as “weak Republicans” seeking a “malleable” senator.

“One main reason Republican voters have supported me in the past is that I haven’t waffled,” Kobach said during an interview.

Republican leaders worry about red-state losses that include the Kentucky and Louisiana governors’ races this year. Setbacks in 2018 included Kobach’s loss to Democrat Laura Kelly in the Kansas governor’s race.

Still, Kobach appeals to many conservative GOP voters, and the speculation about Pompeo is a sign that Kobach has a good chance of winning the Senate primary if Pompeo doesn’t jump in.

If Kobach had no political base, top Republicans in Washington would not be wooing Pompeo, said Kelly Arnold, a former Kansas GOP chairman.

“This seat would no longer be a priority on their list because they’d know it’s in good hands here in Kansas,” Arnold said.

All the major GOP candidates for Roberts’ seat support Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, defend the president, and oppose abortion and gun control. What makes Kobach different is how aggressive he is about poking his critics.

“It’s likability and then, touching-third-rail, caustic comments that drive controversy and nothing else,” said Doug Heye, a GOP consultant in Washington. “Yeah, Donald Trump can do it, but not everybody’s Donald Trump.”

Yet for all the GOP concerns, Kobach’s brand still sells on the right — where the party’s primary races are waged.

“I like a fighter, someone like Donald Trump,” said Sandy Connary, a 66-year-old retired county clerk who attended a Kobach fundraiser in Wichita last week. “He is a known quantity. I know him. I trust him.”

Critics of Kobach’s aggressiveness often reference an iconic jeep he used in the governor’s race for summer and fall parades with a replica machine gun on back. Kobach called criticism of it a “snowflake meltdown.”

“He knew that, that bothered people,” said Tim Shallenburger, another former Kansas GOP chairman and an ex-state treasurer. “He kind of flaunted it.”

The Wichita fundraiser last week featured David Clarke, the cowboy-hat-wearing ex-Milwaukee sheriff who has likened the Black Lives Matter movement to terrorism. Clarke urged the audience of 60 or so people to recapture their anger from 2016.

Kobach has also had fundraisers with ex-White House aide Steve Bannon and conservative commentator Ann Coulter. A 2018 event’s headliner was gun-rights rocker Ted Nugent.

Kobach is a board member and lawyer for a group collecting funds for the border wall and attempting to build parts of it on its own. He upped the ante on border security with a recent column arguing for American military strikes on drug cartels inside Mexico.

He rouses Democrats and liberal activists like no other Republican in Kansas. An online fundraising site for Democrats’ top Senate candidate, state Sen. Barbara Bollier, features Kobach’s picture and says, “we can beat him again in 2020.”

Kobach’s GOP rivals include U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall of western Kansas, Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle, and Dave Lindstrom, a Kansas City-area businessman and former Kansas City Chiefs player.

Wagle took her own fact-finding trip to the border this summer and argues that private wall-building isn’t the proper way to handle border security. Complaints filed by watchdog group Common Cause accuse Kobach of illegally mixing fundraising for the group and his campaign, something he denies.

Kobach has lagged Marshall, Wagle and Lindstrom in campaign cash. He didn’t fill the room at his Wichita event because some of the 100 people who RSVP’d stayed away in the chilly weather.

And Scott Reed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief political strategist, called Kobach “a stone-cold loser.”

“It’s not his positions,” said Reed, who managed Kansas Republican icon Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. “It’s his history as a candidate and the fact that he came up way short.”

Some Republicans worry Kobach can’t win over moderate GOP voters in a general election after spending two decades focusing on illegal immigration as his core issue.

In the governor’s race, Kobach made a migrant caravan moving through Mexico an issue during a late October debate and ran an ad featuring footage from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. Bob Beatty, a Washburn University of Topeka political scientist, doubted other Republicans would go as far in playing to fears about illegal immigration.

Yet support for a tough stance on illegal immigration is widespread within the GOP. A September AP-NORC poll showed about 8 in 10 Republicans nationally expressed approval of Trump’s job handling immigration.

“Kobach almost owns the immigration issue in a way that nobody else can,” said Patrick Miller, a University of Kansas political scientist.

Strong criticism of Kobach helps him with some voters. Glen Burdue, a 73-year-old machine shop worker in a small town south of Wichita, said he likes Kobach partly because Kobach “has taken the most flack” for conservative views.

Vaughn Fox, a 72-year-old retired Wichita automobile dealer, doesn’t see Kobach as too strident.

“Not for true conservative Republicans,” he said.

Lawrence Police Department is seeking assistance in locating a missing elderly adult, according to a media release.

James Lewis Larson, a 90-year-old white male, approximately 6’ tall, 220 lbs., gray hair, blue eyes with eyeglasses, was last seen in Lawrence on Nov. 13 in a maroon 2017 Ford Edge 4-door hatchback bearing Iowa license plate ASG 448.

Mr. Larson was traveling from Iowa with a destination of Yuma, Arizona, however he has yet to arrive. If you see Mr. Larson or his 2017 Ford Edge, please contact the Lawrence Police Department immediately at (785) 832-7509.

TOPEKA, KAN. – A Kansas man was sentenced today to nine years in federal prison for cyberstalking and distributing child pornography, according to U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister.

Blake Adam Austin, 35, Topeka, Kan., pleaded guilty to one count of cyberstalking, one count of possessing child pornography and one count of distributing child pornography.

The investigation began when a middle school teacher in Topeka reported receiving emails from males who wanted to meet her. The males were responding to a Craigslist ad in which someone used the victim’s identity to post sexual content. The problem continued for years until an investigator identified an account Austin was using to post sexual content along with the victim’s contact information.

The victim recognized Austin as someone she had worked with at a coffee shop. He had attempted to initiate a relationship but she had not been interested.

Investigators learned Austin used images of an adult porn star and the victim’s contact information to post ads. He also used images of the victim and her contact information to place half a dozen ads on Craigslist.

On Austin’s laptop, investigators found images of him having sex with a 17-year-old girl. Investigators also learned that Austin uploaded sexually explicit photos of a girl under 15 years old on Skype.

 

SEDGWICK COUNTY— Law enforcement authorities are investigating a registered Kansas sex offender on rape allegations.

Just before 6:30p.m. Monday, police responded to a 911 call of an abduction in the 300 Block of North Volutsia in Wichita, according to Captain Brett Allred.

Upon arrival, police searched the area and located a 2005 Lexus driven by a suspect later identified as 58-year-old Anthony Seymour leaving the area. They also observed a 15-year-old girl exit the vehicle while it was moving slowly and run toward the officers. Seymour fled in the car. Police initially were not able to locate it.

Investigators learned that while the girl was walking home, Seymour approached, held a knife to her, forced her into the Lexus and sexually assaulted her, according to Allred.

Through continued investigation, police located the victim’s phone in a parking lot and were able to obtain video in the area and a tag number on the car. Police located the vehicle and Seymour in the 1900 Block of North Lorraine. He was arrested without incident and booked on requested charges of kidnapping, rape, aggravated criminal sodomy, aggravated battery and a Kansas Department of Corrections arrest and detain order, according to Allred.

“The victim is very brave,” said Allred. “She saw police and took action to get out of the car, run to the officers and explain what had happened.” She had been on her way to Dillons and had seen the suspect and thought he was acting suspiciously. On the way home, the suspect approached her a second time and forced her in the vehicle, according to Allred.

EMS transported the girl to a local hospital for treatment.

Seymour had been on parole since May of 2018 after a 2004 conviction for rape, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections.

 

Briscoe photo KDOC

WICHITA, KAN. – A convicted felon who was arrested with firearms and drugs after fleeing from Salina police was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in federal prison, according U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister.

Jason Briscoe, 42, Minneapolis, Kan., was convicted during a jury trial in May on one count of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine (count one), one count of brandishing a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking (count two), one count of unlawful possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking (count three), two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon (counts four and five), and four counts of unlawful possession of ammunition by a felon (counts six, seven, eight and nine).

 According to court records, officers of the Salina Police Department encountered Briscoe while they were conducting surveillance of the Red Coach hotel.

When police stopped Briscoe’s car, he ran from the car carrying a handgun in his right hand. During the chase, Briscoe dropped the gun and a bag that contained methamphetamine and a second firearm.