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West Allis girl fends off kidnapper with a bag of candy

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A scary situation for a student in West Allis on Thursday after a fifth grader at Horace Mann Middle School says a man tried to kidnap her.

He allegedly grabbed her by the wrist and tried to pull her into his car, but she fought him off with her bag of Valentine’s candy.

Local resident Chini Lorenzana says she’s proud of the girl. “She did everything right and she told the school when she got here and that’s pretty awesome. Pretty brave of her.”

Police say the man is described as possibly Hispanic, between 30 and 40 years old, around 5 and a half feet tall and walked with a limp. He was driving a white S U V with larger than normal tires.

Patterson waives preliminary hearing, will head to trial for Closs kidnapping and murders

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The man accused of kidnapping Jayme Closs and killing her parents is headed to trial

In a very brief hearing on Wednesday, 21-year-old Jake Patterson waived his right to a preliminary hearing.

Barron County judge James Babler accepted that waiver and bound Patterson over for trial on two counts of homicide, one count of kidnapping, and one count of armed burglary.

Police say Patterson confessed to the attack and the kidnapping at the time of his arrest.

Patterson will be back in court for arraignment March 27th.

Madison police seek man in assault on UW student

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Madison Police say they are putting every available resource into finding a man who brutally attacked a woman in downtown Madison. The 19-year-old UW-Madison student was taken to a hospital with injuries to her face after someone she didn’t know grabbed her from behind and beat her while she was walking early Sunday morning.

“This is a stranger attack, very brutal, lots of injuries, on someone who was just going home, so this is priority number one for the police department right now,” said Madison police spokesperson Joel DeSpain.

Police say witnesses saw the man drag the victim toward Lake Mendota.

“Whether or not they scared this stranger off, we don’t know at this point, but we do know that these good Samaritans went down, found her, got her the help she needed,” DeSpain told 27 News.

WIBA

 

Colton Treu preliminary hearing set for April 12th

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A preliminary hearing is set for the man accused of killing three Chippewa Falls Girl Scouts and a mother in a crash. Colten Treu was back in court Wednesday by video conference for a review hearing.

Treu’s attorney’s asked for a delay in his preliminary hearing until April so both sides could review his toxicology results. The defendant’s preliminary hearing is set for April 12th.

Investigators said Treu and a passenger in his truck were “huffing” just before Treu plowed into a Girl Scout troop picking up trash along a Chippewa County road last November. Treu faces eleven charges, including homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle and hit and run resulting in death.

Suspect in custody for Dells-area homicide

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Robert Pulvermacher

After remaining at large for more than a week, the suspect in a Wisconsin Dells-area murder is in jail. A snow plow driver in Madison thought the sight of a man being dropped off early Wednesday morning looked suspicious, so he called police.

When officers arrived, they followed fresh footprints in the snow, leading them to Robert Pulvermacher, who was arrested without incident.

Pulvermacher has been wanted since 88 year-old Howard Johnson of Portage was found stabbed to death in his vehicle in the parking lot at the Ho Chunk casino on January 14th. Pulvermacher is awaiting a bail hearing.

WIBA
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Suspect sought in Dells area homicide

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Robert Pulvermacher

Law enforcement agencies in south central Wisconsin are looking for a suspect in a Wisconsin Dells-area murder.  Robert Pulvermacher of Middleton is wanted for the death of an elderly man whose body was found in a car in the parking lot of the Ho Chunk casino between the Dells and Baraboo on Monday.

The Sauk County sheriff says Pulvermacher may have been spotted in Madison on Tuesday. Pulvermacher has a long criminal record. He’s done time in federal prison, and escaped once in 1998.  Anyone who sees Pulvermacher should not approach him, but call 911 right away.

WIBA

Woman sentenced in fatal OWI crash has daughter in prison for similar conviction

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Kimberly Adams

A 48-year-old Janesville woman who pled guilty in connection a to drunk driving crash that killed her fiance will spend five years in state prison. The woman also has a daughter who’s currently serving time on a similar conviction.

At Kimberly Adams’ sentencing hearing in Rock County Court on Wednesday, prosecutor Scott Dierks said the November 2017 crash that killed 56-year-old Dan Johnson never should have happened. “She’s had a couiple of warnings along the way about drinking and driving,” Diercks noted. Those include a 1st offense OWI convicton in 2010.

Adams’ daughter, 23-year-old Mackenzi Adams, is serving a two-year sentence for a 2015 OWI crash that killed a 26-year-old Lake Geneva woman and injured several others.

“Your case must serve as a warning to anyone, ever contemplating driving a car after drinking,” said Rock County Judge Karl Hanson, who sentenced Kimberly Adams to five years in prison followed by five years extended supervision.

Adams and Johnson had been drinking at a casino in Madison and several bars in Janesville on November 29th of 2017 before she got behind the wheel and sideswiped a parked car. Her vehicle went airborne and landed on its roof. Johnson spent three weeks in the hospital before dying from injuries sustained in the crash.

WCLO

Criminal complaint sheds new light on Closs kidnapping

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A criminal complaint is shedding new light on how 21-year-old Jake Patterson allegedly took Jayme Closs and killed her parents.

That complaint was filed on Monday in Barron County Court. Deputies allege that that 21-year-old Jake Patterson decided to kidnap Jayme Closs after spotting her getting on a school bus on his way home from work. 

Patterson confessed to officers at the time of his arrest last week, and that he planned taking Jayme after seeing her get off a bus. He allegedly didn’t even know her name until after he took her. He also believed that he’d gotten away with it after several weeks.

He also allegedly told police he’d made several attempts at taking her before, but that there had been too many people around at the time.

Closs explained to investigators that after she was taken, Patterson allegedly kept her locked away in his house, and frequently trapped her under a bed using boxes and weights when he left. She had been trapped like that last week, when she was able to escape the house and contact a dog walker.

Patterson now faces homicide and kidnapping charges in the case.

UPDATED: Jayme Closs alive, charges to be filed next week against kidnapper

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Patterson

A Wisconsin 13-year-old girl missing since October has been found alive, according to the Barron County Sheriff’s Department.

The department shared on Facebook Thursday night that they’ve been notified by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department that they have located Jayme Closs alive. A suspect is in custody.

Twin Cities television station KARE reports that the missing girl was located in the Douglas County Town of Gordon. At a Press Conference on Friday, Douglas County Sheriff Tom Dalbec says a Town of Gordon woman walking her dog spotted a girl who said she was Jayme.

“This lady immediately went to a nearby house, notified that neighbor of the claim, and this neighbor called 9-1-1 and my deputies responded.” Closs was able to give a description of the suspect, who’s been named at 21-year-old Jake Patterson of Gordon. 

Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald says Patterson specifically planned to kidnap Jayme.

“We do believe that Jayme was the only target. I can tell you that the subject planned his actions, and took many proactive steps to hide his identity from law enforcement and the general public.”

Barron County prosecutors are planning to file kidnapping and first degree homicide charges against him next week.

Jayme Closs has been missing since her parents James and Denise Closs were found murdered in their Barron home on October 15.

UW-Madison police show off how a gift card scam works on Twitter

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UW-Madison police got to show the public a crash course on how a gift card scam works on their Twitter feed this week.

Community Service Officer Terry Evans responded to a fake ad saying you could work from home for big money. Scammers sent him a phony check and told him to buy them some gift cards.

“They want you to do that as fast as you can because it only takes a few days, maybe a week before that check bounces, and you realize you’ve been taken advantage of.”

The Police Department even cooked up some real looking fake iTunes gift cards for him to send to the scammers, but that was the end of the scam. It only took the crooks a few days to catch on that Evans wasn’t going to send them anything of value.

Evans says putting this sort of thing on social media helps educate people where they are and keep them from becoming victims. “We have a lot of young students who are living on their own for the first time and are susceptible to these type of things.”

“Rather than me sort of telling everyone ‘here’s how to avoid scamming and here’s what happens,’ I thought it was important to kind of show people what they’re going to do to you.”

You can follow along with the scam and the methods that the department used to waste the scammer’s time at http://twitter.com/UnivAptsUWPD