A teenager missing for about seven weeks was found deceased over the weekend, the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday.
Public safety officials found a body Saturday afternoon, and DNA testing confirmed it was 16-year-old Jordan “Manny” Collins Jr., of Columbia Heights. Collins was last seen May 8 near the 4900 block of University Avenue in Columbia Heights.
Anoka County Sheriff Brad Wise said video evidence led authorities to believe Collins’ body went from a dumpster in Columbia Heights to the Elk River Landfill.
They began checking the landfill June 4, and the FBI brought in landfill search experts from Virginia to help coordinate the investigation. After nearly four weeks of searching, Collins’ body was found at the waste management facility.
The circumstances of Collins’ death remain under investigation. Law enforcement has identified a person of interest in the case, but has not publicly identified that person. No one has been arrested or charged.
“We are going to continue to work until we are able to seek justice for Manny’s mom,” Wise said.
If people have information about Collins or his habits in the past several months, Wise asked them to contact the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tip line at 877-996-6222 or bca.tips@state.mn.us.
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Over the course of the recent construction season, major state road work along Arcade Street has alarmed businessowners, some of whom were unaware long swathes of the corridor would be closed in both directions for months at a time.
Even those shop owners who attempted to keep track of road closures were surprised to discover last March that the Minnesota Department of Transportation had rolled out multiple phases of construction at once, limiting business access almost entirely to side streets.
Working with state lawmakers, three East Side business and neighborhood organizations successfully advocated during the recent legislative session for grant funds to help small businessowners through construction.
Sen. Foung Hawj, DFL-St. Paul.
Leaders of the East Side Area Business Association, East Side Neighborhood Development Company and Payne-Phalen Community Council said state Sen. Foung Hawj, St. Paul-DFL, was instrumental in helping to secure the $250,000 in business mitigation grants for businesses along Arcade Street, which is also a state highway — Minnesota 61.
“This will help the hardest hit businesses,” said Paris Dunning, executive director of the East Side Area Business Association.
Organizers hope to support up to 50 small businesses with grants of up to $5,000, which will be geared toward businesses with fewer than 25 employees located within the active construction zone. Details of the grant program are still being fleshed out, but the East Side Neighborhood Development Company is expected to review applications and handle distribution.
“This legislative milestone was built on recognizing the economic impact of state-led infrastructure projects on neighborhood corridors,” said Hawj, in a written statement. “We fought hard for our community to get this relief. And it took persistent optimism at every stage of the process.”
The MnDOT began a two-year road reconstruction project in March along both East Seventh Street and Arcade Street, between Interstate 94 in St. Paul and Roselawn Avenue in Maplewood.
Some of that work, initially planned in back-to-back segments, has rolled out concurrently. State transportation officials have said coordinating with utility companies for underground utility replacements — including lead pipe removal — required shifting schedules around, and information about the new schedule had been shared at a community meeting in March.
Through early fall, construction will limit business access along Arcade Street from Wheelock Parkway to Maryland Avenue, from Maryland Avenue to York Avenue, from York Avenue to Frost Avenue, and between Magnolia Avenue and Sims Avenue.
Most of the work along East Seventh Street will take place in 2026.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whose multimillion-dollar ministry and huge audience dwindled following his prostitution scandals, has died. He was 90.
Swaggart death was announced Tuesday on his public Facebook page. A cause wasn’t immediately given, though Swaggart had been in ill health.
The Louisiana native was best known for being a captivating Pentecostal preacher with a massive following before being caught on camera with a prostitute in New Orleans in 1988, one of a string of successful TV preachers brought down in the 1980s and ’90s by sex scandals. He continued preaching for decades, but with a reduced audience.
Swaggart encapsulated his downfall in a tearful 1988 sermon, in which he wept and apologized but made no reference to his connection to a prostitute.
“I have sinned against you,” Swaggart told parishioners nationwide. “I beg you to forgive me.”
He announced his resignation from the Assemblies of God later that year, shortly after the church said it was defrocking him for rejecting punishment it had ordered for “moral failure.” The church had wanted him to undergo a two-year rehabilitation program, including not preaching for a full year.
Swaggart said at the time that he knew dismissal was inevitable but insisted he had no choice but to separate from the church to save his ministry and Bible college.
FILE – Members of the audience react to evangelist Jimmy Swaggart during a recent rally in Milwaukee, Feb. 10, 1985. (AP Photo/Joseph Jensen Jr, file)
FILE – Rev. Jimmy Swaggart raises his fist to make point at news conference at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles, Friday, March 27, 1987. (AP Photo/Lennox McLendon, file)
FILE – Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart speaks at the funeral service for his cousin, rock and roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis, in Ferriday, La., Saturday, Nov. 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, file)
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FILE – Members of the audience react to evangelist Jimmy Swaggart during a recent rally in Milwaukee, Feb. 10, 1985. (AP Photo/Joseph Jensen Jr, file)
Swaggart grew up poor, the son of a preacher, in a music-rich family. He excelled at piano and gospel music, playing and singing with talented cousins who took different paths: rock-‘n’-roller Jerry Lee Lewis and country singer Mickey Gilley.
In his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana, Swaggart said he first heard the call of God at age 8. The voice gave him goose bumps and made his hair tingle, he said.
“Everything seemed different after that day in front of the Arcade Theater,” he said in a 1985 interview with the Jacksonville Journal-Courier in Illinois. “I felt better inside. Almost like taking a bath.”
He preached and worked part time in oil fields until he was 23. He then moved entirely into his ministry: preaching, playing piano and singing gospel songs with the barrelhouse fervor of cousin Lewis at Assemblies of God revivals and camp meetings.
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Swaggart started a radio show, a magazine, and then moved into television, with outspoken views.
He called Roman Catholicism “a false religion. It is not the Christian way,” and claimed that Jews suffered for thousands of years “because of their rejection of Christ.”
“If you don’t like what I say, talk to my boss,” he once shouted as he strode in front of his congregation at his Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, where his sermons moved listeners to speak in tongues and stand up as if possessed by the Holy Spirit.
Swaggart’s messages stirred thousands of congregants and millions of TV viewers, making him a household name by the late 1980s. Contributors built Jimmy Swaggart Ministries into a business that made an estimated $142 million in 1986.
His Baton Rouge complex still includes a worship center and broadcasting and recording facilities.
The scandals that led to Swaggart’s ruin
Swaggart’s downfall came in the late 1980s as other prominent preachers faced similar scandals. Swaggart said publicly that his earnings were hurt in 1987 by the sex scandal surrounding rival televangelist Jim Bakker and a former church secretary at Bakker’s PTL ministry organization.
The following year, Swaggart was photographed at a hotel with Debra Murphree, an admitted prostitute who told reporters that the two did not have sex but that the preacher had paid her to pose nude.
She later repeated the claim — and posed nude — for Penthouse magazine.
The surveillance photos that crippled Swaggart’s career apparently stemmed from his rivalry with preacher Marvin Gorman, whom Swaggart had accused of sexual misdeeds. Gorman hired the photographer who captured Swaggart and Murphree on film. Swaggart later paid Gorman $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit over the sexual allegations against Gorman.
More trouble came in 1991, when police in California detained Swaggart with another prostitute. The evangelist was charged with driving on the wrong side of the road and driving an unregistered Jaguar. His companion, Rosemary Garcia, said Swaggart became nervous when he saw the police car and weaved when he tried to stuff pornographic magazines under a car seat.
Swaggart was later mocked by the late TV comic Phil Hartman, who impersonated him on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Out of the public eye but still in the pulpit
The evangelist largely stayed out of the news in later years but remained in the pulpit at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, often joined by his son, Donnie, a fellow preacher. His radio station broadcast church services and gospel music to 21 states, and Swaggart’s ministry boasted a worldwide audience on the internet.
The preacher caused another brief stir in 2004 with remarks about being “looked at” amorously by a gay man.
“And I’m going to be blunt and plain: If one ever looks at me like that, I’m going to kill him and tell God he died,” Swaggart said, to laughter from the congregation. He later apologized.
Swaggart made few public appearances outside his church, save for singing “Amazing Grace” at the 2005 funeral of Louisiana Secretary of State Fox McKeithen, a prominent name in state politics for decades.
In 2022, he shared memories at the memorial service for Lewis, his cousin and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. The pair had released “The Boys From Ferriday,” a gospel album, earlier that year.
NEW YORK (AP) — A jury returned to deliberate for a second day Tuesday at hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs ‘ federal racketeering and sex trafficking trial.
Jurors were back behind closed doors weighing whether prosecutors proved the charges at a trial that began in early May.
Combs’ lawyers and prosecutors, meanwhile, began the day wrangling in the courtroom with Judge Arun Subramanian over how he planned to answer the jury’s latest question.
Jurors ended the day Monday by asking the judge for clarification about what qualifies as drug distribution, an aspect of the racketeering conspiracy charge that will help determine whether Combs can be convicted or exonerated on the count.
Subramanian said he would remind jurors of the instructions he gave them on that part of the case before they started deliberating on Monday. Combs’ lawyers had pushed for a more expansive response, but prosecutors argued — and Subramanian agreed — that doing so could end up confusing jurors more.
On Monday, the panel deliberated over five hours without reaching a verdict.
Prosecutors say Combs for two decades used his fame, fortune and a roster of employees and associates to force two girlfriends into sexual encounters with male sex workers for days at a time while he watched and sometimes filmed the drug-fueled events.
Defense lawyers contend prosecutors are trying to criminalize Combs’ swinger lifestyle. If anything, they say, Combs’ conduct amounted to domestic violence not federal felonies.
Combs, 55, could face 15 years in prison to life behind bars if he is convicted of all charges.
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After pleading not guilty, Combs chose not to testify as his lawyers built their arguments for acquittal mostly through lengthy cross examinations of dozens of witnesses called by prosecutors, including some of Combs’ former employees who took the witness stand reluctantly only after being granted immunity.
When jurors first left the room to begin deliberating on Monday, Combs sat for a while slumped in his chair at the defense table before standing and turning toward three rows of spectators packed with his family and friends.
Those supporters held hands and lowered their heads in prayer, as did Combs, who was several feet from them in the well of the courtroom. After they finished, they together applauded, and so did Combs, still clapping as he turned back toward the front of the room.
Combs also showed off two books he’s reading: “The Power of Positive Thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale and “The Happiness Advantage” by Shawn Achor.
Barely an hour into deliberations, the jury foreperson sent a note to the judge, complaining that there was one juror “who we are concerned cannot follow your Honor’s instructions. May I please speak with your Honor or may you please interview him?”
The judge decided instead to send jurors a note reminding them of their duties to deliberate and obligation to follow his instructions on the law.
By day’s end, the jury seemed back on track, sending the note about drug distribution.
