North Oaks product Frankie Capan III shot a 3-under 68 in the final round Sunday to finish 24-under on the week — good for fourth in the Veritex Bank Championship in Arlington, Texas.

Tom Widing shot an 8-under 63 on Sunday to get to 31-under and win the event — his second-straight victory — by four strokes.

The finish moves Capan up from 30th to 22nd on the Korn Ferry Tour’s season-long points list. The top 30 on the list at year’s end earn PGA Tour cards.

Capan has now logged three consecutive top-10 finishes.

He led this week’s event after the first round Thursday, when he shot a 13-under 58 to set a new Texas Rangers Golf Club course record, besting the previous record of 59 set by Scottie Scheffler.

Capan was in solo second, two back of Widing entering Sunday’s final round. He carded a 3-under 32 on the front-nine Sunday before sputtering a bit on his final nine.

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Before Christina Bogojevic joined the Minnesota State Patrol, the Hayfield native tried her hand at jobs that never seemed to stick: a phlebotomist, a school paraprofessional and an administrative specialist in a real estate office.

At 27, Bogojevic made another career move after earning a two-year degree in law enforcement from Rochester Community and Technical College. It became a launching pad into a two-decade career that is now about to enter a new chapter: On Thursday, Bogojevic will become only the second woman to run the Minnesota State Patrol in its 95-year history.

For Bogojevic, what made State Patrol so much more fulfilling than anything she had previously tried was the “ability to do something different every day, and talk to people every day.”

“I hadn’t found that in any of the other jobs that I had held,” she said.

The question is whether the feeling is mutual. Most people’s interactions with the State Patrol come from peeking in the rearview mirror and experiencing an adrenaline rush from seeing flashing red lights. It’s not viewed as a pleasant thing by most drivers.

Christina Bogojevic begins her role as Minnesota State Patrol’s colonel on May 2. (Courtesy of the Minnesota State Patrol)

“You say it’s not a positive thing,” but the agency gets feedback — letters and social media posts — “thanking our troops for the work they do,” she said. Just recently, a woman driver took to Facebook to thank a trooper for pulling her over twice for erratic driving “that could have ended very differently.”

“It changed her driver behavior,” Bogojevic said.

Bogojevic, 48, will head a 900-person agency that includes 625 state troopers whose primary mission is enforcing traffic safety on the state’s highways and interstates. She takes over at a time when those roads have become markedly more dangerous. People are driving faster and more carelessly, pushing up the fatality rate 35% higher this year than last year at this time.

Bogojevic says a number of factors have contributed to that spike in road deaths: speeding, drinking and driving, lack of seat belt use, and a big counterintuitive factor has been the state’s relatively mild winter.

Snowy and ice-covered roads tend to induce more cautious driving. So even though there are more crashes during a typical Minnesota winter, they tend not to lead to serious injury or death because people drive slower. Now drivers are popping the clutch on the state’s snow-free roads and paying a deadly price. It’s among her priorities to reduce that number.

Bogojevic started her law enforcement career as a part-time police officer in Grand Meadow, Minnesota. Given the choice between working full time at an all-male police department or a State Patrol led by the first woman colonel, Anna Beers, she chose the latter because of the agency’s trailblazing role in elevating a woman to the top job.

After a brief stint in the east metro district, Bogojevic transferred to the Rochester district and rose through the ranks until being named colonel this month.

Like law enforcement nationwide, the Minnesota State Patrol is seeing sagging numbers in terms of applications and recruitment. But last week, she noted, the patrol graduated a new class of 35 troopers — a hopeful sign.

“Although our recruitment numbers are down, the applicants that we are getting are very qualified,” she said.

She hopes her elevation will have the same effect on job seekers as Beers had on her. Bogojevic co-leads the State Patrol 30×30 project, an initiative that seeks to have 30% of its State Patrol workforce made up of women by 2030. It’s an ambitious target. Only 8% of its workforce is currently made up of women.

“I’m hopeful that other females see this as an opportunity,” Bogojevic said. “The people of this agency are extraordinary. So to be able to lead them is a great honor.”

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Senate DFL leaders announced Sunday that Sen. Nicole Mitchell would be relieved of her committee assignments and would not caucus with DFL lawmakers while her burglary case proceeds in the courts.

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, said in a statement that the situation is “tragic” and questions remained unanswered, but she stopped short of blocking Mitchell from participating in floor votes.

“While the case is under review both in the Senate and in the courts, Senator Mitchell will be relieved of her committee assignments and removed from caucus meetings,” Murphy said.

Murphy announced last week that an ethics probe into Mitchell’s arrest has started and the Senate Ethics Subcommittee is scheduled to meet May 7 to take up a complaint filed against her.

The announcement comes just under a week after Mitchell’s felony burglary arrest and as lawmakers ready for the last three weeks of the legislative session.

Neither Mitchell nor the Senate DFL caucus has said whether she will be in attendance this week. Even in her absence, she’ll loom large over what could get accomplished or fall by the wayside this year.

Last week, Mitchell was excused for both days the Senate came in. The first-term Woodbury legislator said in a statement that she had no plan to resign. Her term runs through 2026.

Sen. Nicole Mitchell’s empty seat is pictured during a session at the Capitol in St. Paul on Wednesday, April 24. (Ben Hovland / MPR News)

DFL leaders have not publicly called for her to step down and have said they’ll consider green-lighting her remote participation on a day-by-day basis.

“She’s elected to represent the people in the district that sent her here and they deserve her representation,” Murphy told reporters last week.

Senate activity on bills ground to a stop in Mitchell’s absence and questions remain about what could pass in an evenly divided chamber.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Melissa Hortman said the situation wouldn’t impact the trajectory for the DFL-led House. That chamber is set to vote on a raft of budget and policy bills this week including three that would add new gun restrictions on Monday.

“The conclusion I’ve reached is that we need to put our heads down and keep doing our work,” Hortman, of Brooklyn Park, said. “The senator is innocent until proven guilty, there are further dates scheduled in her criminal proceeding. I’ve gone back and looked at the record in the House and there have been cases where some very serious charges have been leveled against an individual and they remained serving and they remained voting until the charges were resolved.”

Democrats’ priority bills could hinge on the one-vote advantage in the Senate. Without Mitchell, the chamber stands at a 33-33 split. There is no tiebreaker vote.

If she steps down or continues to be away from the Capitol, bills that Republicans view as too partisan may stall. And if she comes back, Republicans have said that they could grind things to a halt as a protest of her participation.

“If they’re going to rely on somebody who’s under investigation for first-degree burglary to get their bills through, instead of working with Republicans in a bipartisan manner, shame on them,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks. “This is about doing what’s right for Minnesota, not getting a political agenda through at this point.”

As budget touch-up bills and policy proposals move forward in the House, Republicans have sought to moderate them but haven’t had much success. House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said she hopes that DFL leaders take GOP feedback into account and trim bills so they can pick up bipartisan backing.

“With (a) potential tie in the Senate, our votes are actually going to be needed on anything else that’s brought forward,” Demuth said. “We know that we could look at things that are not partisan, but need to be done finding a way to strip out any of the concerning things or the junk that might be in and finding ways that we could come to an agreement and be able to and serve the people of Minnesota.”

Without that sort of moderation, it remains to be seen if the bills will just hit a wall in the Senate or if Mitchell will return and provide the vote to get them through.

Negotiations are also underway for a public construction projects bill. Legislative leaders met last week to talk through parameters for the bill and for other measures that might be used as leverage to pass it.

Unlike other proposals, the bill requires a three-fifths majority of each chamber to pass because it lets the state take on debt to fund projects. Hortman said she asked GOP leaders to offer up their conditions for the bonding bill and accompanying proposals.

GOP leaders have floated a funding boost to emergency medical service providers in rural Minnesota as a condition of their support. The governor and DFL leaders have set a $16 million target, but EMS providers say they need significantly more than that to stay afloat.

GOP leaders also called for less state spending and opposed any new tax increases this year. Depending on how the ethics investigation into Mitchell’s arrest plays out, they could also ask for a fast-track for that as part of their negotiation.

Lawmakers don’t have to pass anything this year. They approved a two-year budget last year so the state government won’t shut down if they go home without passing a bonding bill or other spending bills.

DFL leaders said they remain hopeful that they can get their priorities across the finish line before the Legislature’s May 20 adjournment date.

MPR News senior politics reporter Clay Masters contributed to this report.

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ANAHEIM, Calif. >> Kyle Farmer didn’t think much of it when he left a tangy summer sausage that he received as a gift from Cloverdale, whom he did an advertisement for last year, on a table in the Twins’ clubhouse.

Maybe a hungry teammate would grab it and have a nice snack.

Instead, it seems as if that sausage has turned into a good-luck charm for the Twins, who have turned their season around with seven straight wins and now make sure to tap the sausage before they head to the plate.

“Maybe it’s because of the sausage that it’s all happening in the first place,” manager Rocco Baldelli surmised.

Perhaps it is, seeing as the sausage first appeared in the dugout while Minnesota was getting shutout against the White Sox earlier in the week. The Twins had been held scoreless for the first five innings of Thursday’s game. But once the sausage appeared in the dugout, they rattled off five straight hits.

Why, exactly, did the sausage make its way into the dugout in the first place?

“I guess Pop grabbed it and brought it in the dugout,” Farmer said, referring to hitting coach David Popkins. “I hope it lasts the whole year and doesn’t get moldy or anything.”

Hey, whatever works.

The Twins’ sluggish start had seen them spend the first 20 or so games as the worst-hitting team in the majors. But the offense finally seems to have started clicking — in their last seven games, they’ve scored at least five runs in each, highlighted by a 16-run outburst on Saturday against the Angels. On Sunday, for the second straight day, they collected 17 hits.

Eagle-eyed observers first noticed the sausage when it was flipped to first baseman Carlos Santana after he hit his third home run in as many days on Saturday.

As he approached the dugout, Santana leapt up and snagged it.

“It worked,” Santana said. “Everything in baseball, when it works, we do it.”

Later in Saturday’s game, right fielder Max Kepler was also seen clutching the link in the dugout after hitting his first home run of the season.

“Everyone touches it before we go to the plate,” Farmer said. “You just kind of tap it. Every at-bat. … It just happened kind of organically.”

The sausage — yes, the Twins only have one — resides near the bat rack in the dugout during games. It was stashed in catcher Ryan Jeffers’ bag on the way to California. Jeffers suggested that, at some point, the original item might need to be replaced by a non-perishable sausage.

The Twins’ manager is all for it — “it’s bringing us lots of hits and runs,” Baldelli noted, though he shares some of the same thoughts that Jeffers has.

Yes… we apparently have a HR Sausage now.

No… we don’t know why. pic.twitter.com/KTFEzSsLsW

— Minnesota Twins (@Twins) April 28, 2024

“I’m not even an adult, but slightly concerned as more of an adult than maybe some of the people in the other room that the package is going to open up and the thing hasn’t been refrigerated in many days,” Baldelli said. “There is no doubt when that thing opens up, whoever is touching it is in deep trouble. There is no doubt in my mind that we are carrying around something that is very, very unhealthy to the human body.”

This is Minnesota’s second sausage-related storyline this season as center fielder Byron Buxton was nearly run over by one of Milwaukee’s famous racing sausages earlier this season.

That led Farmer to proclaim it “the year of the sausage.”

“I guess we’re going to keep touching the sausage,” Farmer said. “Baseball players are messed up.”