Wayne Prokosch, of River City Welding in Stockholm, Wis., may never have to buy another drink in the St. Croix River Valley.

Prokosch spent much of the weekend working to remove an abandoned 54-foot cruiser from the St. Croix River near Hudson, Wis. — a move that’s led to numerous people up and down the river offering to buy him dinner and drinks. People were even cheering from shore as he towed the Sweet Destiny down river on Sunday morning, he said.

“I’m not a hero,” he said. “We do this every day on the job, so it’s no big deal to us. Everybody’s just happy to see it gone, you know? And so am I. I got sick of the phone calls about it. There’s not very many people who are capable of doing the project. Sometimes you just got to do the right thing, you know?”

Prokosch started the job, along with three other men, on Friday morning and got the boat — called Sweet Destiny — to the Hudson Excursion docks in Hudson owned by St. Croix River Cruises. Prokosch worked with Josh Stokes, a River City Welding employee, and Gordy and Dave Jarvis from St. Croix Cruises and the Afton House Inn to get the water pumped out from the boat and towed away.

Prokosch had a prior commitment on Saturday — his daughter was graduating from the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire — so the boat stayed docked at the Hudson Excursion dock with constant pumping and supervision, Dave Jarvis said.

By 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning, Prokosch was back on site with his barge and crane.

“We had our equipment up in the area anyway, so we just decided we could take a few hours out of our day,” Prokosch said. “I figured we would just swing in there and make it happen, and get rid of the story and get rid of the headache and just all the crap that went with it.”

It took until about 1:30 p.m. to make the 50-mile journey to Hager City, Wis., which included a journey through Lock #3 on the Mississippi River.

“We had to keep the pumps running the whole time because the boat was leaking like crazy — 15 gallons every 10 minutes,” he said.

Once they got to Hager City, across the river from Red Wing, Minn., crews hauled the boat out on a hydraulic trailer and put it on the back of a semitractor trailer belonging to EdgeWater Boat Storage & Transport for the five-mile trip to the company’s storage area, he said.

Prokosch, who has worked on the river since 1992, said he has done work for the cities of Hudson and Prescott, Wis., in the past.

“That’s another reason why I did it: just to do a public duty,” he said. “I just wanted to get rid of all the talk about the boat on the river and just put it behind us.”

He said he hopes Grayson McNew, the man who abandoned the boat on Beer Can Island in August 2024, after it started to take on water, learned a valuable lesson from the experience.

“If it sounds too good to be true, most of the time, it usually is,” Prokosch said.

A man who hopes to restore the boat paid River City Welding $5,000 for their work; the job would normally cost much more than that, said Dave Jarvis, who helped coordinate the removal. The man, who asked not to be identified, also paid $1,300 EdgeWater for their services, Jarvis said.

“All these government agencies couldn’t get it done,” he said. “But two river veterans (Prokosch and Gordy Jarvis) could. It’s been an eyesore and, frankly, an embarrassing thing for our community for too long.”

McNew, of Afton, owes the City of Hudson about $21,000 in fines for abandoning the boat, Hudson City Administrator Brentt Michalek said Monday.

“It’s already gone to collections,” he said. “We could choose to waive some of it, but there are costs that are already incurred by the city that he is responsible for. This wasn’t a cheap thing for us. A lot of time was spent trying to get this individual to move his boat.”

The Jarvises plan to work with the Hudson business community to raise extra funds for Prokosch, Gordy Jarvis said.

“Wayne deserves some some recognition,” Gordy Jarvis said. “He’s such a humble guy that he doesn’t really want anything, but he’s so deserving, and the community knows it, and they want to be a part of that.”

Dave Jarvis said he hopes the man who paid the initial fee to remove the boat gets it fixed up and seaworthy again.

“Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “All I can say is, God bless anyone who wants to try to fix it up. It’s going to take a lot of love and the right knowledge and the right person. But it may happen. You never know. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

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The Twins and Cleveland Guardians did what they could to get a game in on Monday night at Target Field. But in the end, the weather wouldn’t cooperate for long enough.

The two teams made it through three innings on Monday before the game was officially suspended around 9:10 p.m.

The game is scheduled to resume on Tuesday at 5:10 p.m. with the regularly-scheduled game starting 30 minutes later. But with more rain in the forecast on Tuesday, it seems unlikely that nearly two full games will be played.

The Twins had just taken a 2-1 lead in the second inning when the rain, which had been coming down for most of the game, intensified.

At 7:13 p.m., the two teams left the field for the first rain delay of the night. As the rain slowed, managers Rocco Baldelli and Stephen Vogt conferred with the umpires, eventually moving their conversation from the third base side to the middle of the field.

Shortly after their meeting broke up, players re-emerged on the field.

That rain delay lasted 61 minutes, after which the two teams returned for 14 minutes before the tarp went right back on the field at 8:28 p.m.

At around 9:10 p.m., the game was officially suspended. Fans who were in attendance on Monday will receive a voucher for a future game.

After the Guardians struck first off Bailey Ober to begin the game, the Twins used an RBI hit from Ty France to even the score in the bottom of the first.

An inning later, Willi Castro drove in Harrison Bader, giving the Twins the lead.

That was where things stood when the first delay was called. After they returned, Ryan Jeffers struck out, leaving Castro on second base.

They played one more inning after that before heading back inside for good.

A 59-year-old man charged in January with raping a 71-year-old St. Paul woman he met on Facebook is now accused of committing a 2013 sexual assault at a Maplewood motel.

Thao Xiong’s DNA came back as a match through an initiative to analyze a backlog of untested sexual assault kits, according to a Ramsey County District Court criminal complaint charging him Friday by warrant with felony first-degree criminal sexual conduct.

Thao Xiong, shown in January 2025 (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Xiong remained out of custody on Monday. He was released from jail on March 21 after posting a $50,000 bond in the January case that also charges him with first-degree criminal sexual conduct.

Xiong allegedly committed that offense while on probation for a 2020 first-degree criminal sexual conduct conviction involving a 41-year-old woman during a night of drinking at his St. Paul apartment in July 2019.

According to the Friday’s criminal complaint:

A woman reported to police on July 15, 2013, that she had just been forcibly sexually assaulted at a motel off U.S. 61 in Maplewood by a man she knew as “Chue Lee,” identified in November 2020 through a DNA match as Xiong.

The woman said she had been talking with “Chue” for two days over the phone, that she did not know him previously and had assumed he got her number from someone she knew.

She said he called her on July 15 and said he was coming to Minnesota from Wisconsin and wanted her to show him around. They also planned to go for a walk by a lake.

She met Xiong in the parking lot of a St. Paul grocery store, where he suggested they take one car and offered to drive. She agreed and got into his car. He drove past the lake, telling her they were going to get something to eat first. Rather than going to a restaurant, he brought her to the motel, saying he wanted to get some rest before eating.

Xiong rented the room and once inside began “ripping her clothes apart,” the complaint says. She said he “overpowered” her and raped her.

She went to a hospital for a sexual assault examination the same day. A nurse examiner noted bruising to the woman’s body and she complained about areas where she said Xiong had bitten her.

She told the nurse the assault began immediately after they got into the motel room and Xiong locked the door. After the assault, she said, Xiong appeared scared, so she got in his car. Xiong dropped her off and about 15 minutes later he called her and left a “cruel message,” which she later provided to police.

The complaint says motel video shows Xiong arriving with the woman in a gray Toyota Prius just after 5 p.m. He went into the motel office and then moved the car in front of a room. The two entered the room at 5:15 p.m. and left 45 minutes later.

An investigator in late July 2020 discovered the sexual assault kit, which had not been tested. It was brought to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and four months later an unidentified male DNA profile taken from swabs of the woman was entered into the state’s DNA databases and the National DNA Index System.

The BCA notified St. Paul police on Nov. 4, 2020, that Xiong’s DNA, obtained from his 2019 sexual assault case, matched the DNA in the 2013 assault. Police tried to contact the woman but were unsuccessful, the complaint says.

Last March, police were told DNA collected from Xiong in the January case matched the DNA found on the swabs taken from the 2013 victim, the complaint says.

Police tried to locate the woman and reached her on April 10 after her son called to ask why they were trying to contact his mother who does not speak English, the complaint says. She told police through an interpreter she “had been waiting for a very long time for an update on her case and wants him prosecuted for sexually assaulting her,” the complaint says.

Police sent the case to the attorney’s office for charging consideration last month.

Kate Courtney, Xiong’s attorney in the January case, said Monday she could not comment on Friday’s charge because she has been out of town and has not read the complaint.

Previous charges

According to January’s complaint, St. Paul police were dispatched to the 71-year-old woman’s apartment in the Summit-University neighborhood about 6:30 p.m. Jan. 28 after she reported she had just been forcefully sexually assaulted by a man, who was later identified as Xiong.

She told police someone must have given Xiong her phone number because he called, asking to meet. She agreed, and invited him over. When he entered the apartment, she told police, he pushed her into her bedroom, took off her clothes and raped her.

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She gave police a Facebook profile that Xiong used to contact her. As an officer pulled up the profile, she immediately said, “that’s him,” the complaint states. He was arrested Jan. 28 after police obtained a search warrant for his apartment in St. Paul’s Payne-Phalen neighborhood and found him hiding under his bed.

Court records show that Xiong reached a plea deal with prosecutors in the 2019 case and admitted to fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct in exchange for a first-degree charge being dismissed. He was sentenced to 231 days in jail, which was time that he had already served after his arrest, and put on supervised probation for 10 years.

Xiong has no other convictions, besides two petty misdemeanor traffic violations.

 

With just hours remaining in the regular 2025 legislative session on Monday, Minnesota lawmakers still hadn’t granted final passage to major pieces of the upcoming two-year state budget, including bills on taxes, education and health care spending.

A special session will be required to enact last week’s $66 billion or so budget framework agreement reached by Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor majority Senate and DFL and Republican leadership the 67-67 tied House.

As of Monday afternoon, only a handful of the 20 or so spending bills that comprise the budget had made it through both the Senate and House and were headed to Walz’s desk to be signed into law.

Around two-thirds of the general fund budget — human health and human services and K-12 education — remain up in the air, and there are still unresolved questions about support for the budget deal.

Walz told reporters Monday afternoon that he wasn’t worried about getting the budget done before the June 30 deadline, and that the biggest pieces often come last. He added he’d call lawmakers back to the Capitol for a special session “when the work’s done” on final bills and that he hopes it will only be for one day.

Gov. Tim Walz.

If the Legislature doesn’t pass a budget by the end of the two-year fiscal period, the state government will shut down. Layoff notices start going out to state workers on June 1. If there is no deal by then. Lawmakers and the governor said they hope to wrap up the budget before the end of May.

What’s the holdup?

Despite leaders calling it a “deal,” it’s only an agreement between top lawmakers and the governor and some of it is still up for intense debate.

Walz, Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman, and Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth, signed off on the deal, but many DFLers are not on board with an proposal to end state-funded MinnesotaCare insurance coverage for adults in the U.S. illegally.

That was a GOP priority in negotiations, and DFL leaders say they agreed to it because they wanted to avert a government shutdown on July 1 — which would interrupt a significant range of services in the state.

Many DFLers say they won’t support the proposal. And they’ve also accused Republicans of trying to make late changes to the deal, like creating more rollbacks for the state paid family and medical leave program.

“Republicans keep moving the goal posts. None of the GOP demands are necessary to pass the state budget bill,” said House Floor Leader Jaime Long, DFL-Minneapolis.

Demuth blamed the late budget bills on a weekslong House DFL boycott at the beginning of session that delayed business as the tied chamber’s power struggle worked its way through court.

“As I’ve talked about from the very start that I believed that we could have gotten this done on time,” she said. “Our Democrat colleagues didn’t show up for work and we ended up doing that. 23 days in a row.”

Special sessions become the norm for passing a budget under divided government.  The last time a divided government passed a budget without going into overtime was 2007.

What has passed?

As of 7 p.m. Monday, lawmakers had passed a number of smaller pieces of the budget. One big part of the budget deal that got some pushback was the closure of the aging state prison in Stillwater, though the House and Senate approved that change in a judiciary and public safety budget bill over the weekend.

Besides that, bills on agriculture, veterans affairs, housing and Legacy Amendment funds for outdoors, parks and the arts are also on the way to Walz.

Changes to public employee pensions headed to becoming law as part of a bill passed by the Senate Monday will help insulate state State Patrol and other state public safety pensions against inflation with cost of living adjustments.

What remains?

Most of what makes up the budget hasn’t made it to the finish line. A health bill that carries they deal cut MinnesotaCare benefits for adults in the U.S. illegally has not made it to a vote in either chamber.

A tax bill has not yet materialized, though as part of the budget deal the state plans to raise the tax on cannabis products. Republicans got DFLers to agree to cut the maximum rate for a payroll tax for the new paid family and medical leave program from 1.2% to 1.1%.

Walz’s proposed reduction of the overall state sales tax rate and the creation of a new tax on services like accounting and legal advice did not make it to the final deal. Nor did a Senate DFL proposed first-in-the-nation tax on social media platforms.

A pre-K-12 education budget bill that holds state spending level to inflation for the next two-years still hasn’t made it through. A GOP push to eliminate unemployment for hourly school workers is also headed for the dustbin as a result of the budget deal, DFLers said.

The education budget makes up around one-third of the current $71 billion two-year state budget. Under the deal, education spending will remain level for the next two years other than the required inflation-tied increases.

Higher education, transportation and human services also remain unfinished.

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