Burnsville High School teen charged with having gun after other students saw him making video

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A 16-year-old student charged with having a gun at Burnsville High School reported he bought the gun from an unknown male for protection at school, according to the Dakota County attorney’s office.

Prosecutors announced Thursday they charged the Burnsville teen with two weapons violations after he was arrested at the school Tuesday.

Concerned students told school officials they witnessed the teen taking a video of himself with a gun in a school bathroom, the Dakota County attorney’s office said of the juvenile petition. School staff located the teen and escorted him to the dean’s office, where a gun was found in his backpack.

The school reported Tuesday that they suspected another student had a gun and Burnsville police responded about 10:45 a.m. Officers did not find a second gun. The firearm in the teen’s backpack was identified as a handgun with a fully loaded magazine containing 21 rounds.

The teen said “no specific threats of harm or violence were directed at him” and he is not accused of threatening other students, according to the Dakota County attorney’s office.

He was taken to the Juvenile Services Center in Hastings and made his first appearance in the case in juvenile court Thursday, where a judge ordered him to remain in custody. His next hearing will be in less than two weeks.

The teen is charged with possession of a dangerous weapon on school property and possession of a firearm or ammunition by a person under age 18.

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Alary’s Bar in downtown St. Paul to reopen with new owner

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Alary’s Bar, a fixture in downtown St. Paul since 1949, is coming back.

The bar, which has been through many changes since its inception as a burlesque club, closed in June of 2023. Rumors at the time were that there was a new owner and that the concept would change.

We now know who the new owner is, and fans of the Chicago Bears bar will be happy to know that it will continue to be Alary’s and will operate a sports bar.

Bill Collins, owner of Camp Bar on Robert Street, has purchased the art deco building, and as a Chicago native, plans to change very little.

“I actually grew up in Chicago, and my family were season ticket holders for the Bears,” Collins said.

The theme fits with the original ownership, Collins said. Alary’s is a portmanteau of Al and Larry. The Al refers to Al Basai, who played guard for the Chicago Bears in the 1940s. He partnered with Larry Lehner to open the bar in 1949.

Collins, who is now a Green Bay Packers fan (Camp is an official Packers bar), thinks having two bars with rival fandoms will offer some fun opportunities.

“We could do traveling trophies; there are a whole lot of things we can do,” Collins said. “In the big scheme of things we are living in Vikings territory, so we are both sort of like the red-headed stepchildren.”

Besides American football, Collins plans to embrace the European version — soccer. And of course, the Minnesota Wild. Plans are in place to fire up the shuttles that used to run to Wild games to run to Allianz Field for Minnesota United games and St. Paul Saints games at CHS Field, too.

The bar offers free parking in the Block 19 Ramp (one door east) weekdays after 4 p.m. and all day on weekends. They are also in the process of finalizing a deal to offer parking in the adjacent lot at the rear of the building.

The most recent owners put in a sizeable kitchen, and Collins, who is a bar guy, not a restaurant guy, said he’s hoping to find someone to run the kitchen as a separate business that will, of course, serve the bar. It’s big enough that someone could operate a ghost kitchen or catering business out of it as well. For now, he said, they’ll serve the most ubiquitous Minnesota bar food — Heggie’s Pizza.

As far as the decor, besides sports gear, Collins plans to lean into the history of the place.

“We have 75 years’ worth of memorabilia on the upper floors,” Collins said. “We have historic photos of downtown, vintage neon, bar and restaurant photos — we plan to display a lot of that. If you’ve got a bar with this much history, it’s nice to have some of that stuff around.”

And the iconic stuffed Chicago Bear is coming back, too. Sportswriter and Bears fan LaVelle Neal from the Star Tribune had it, Collins said, but has returned it to its rightful home.

They’ll also be upgrading the audio/visual equipment so that watching games from Alary’s is a better experience.

The bar held a successful pop-up during St. Patrick’s Day, and Collins said he was glad to find that everything still worked well. They’re planning another pop-up during the Frozen Four during the weekend of April 10-13. Hours will be 3 p.m. until midnight, and shuttles will run continuously April 11 from 4 to 11:30 p.m. and April 13 from 5 to 9 p.m.

If everything goes well, Alary’s will be back up and running full time in May, just in time for patio season. The bar has a sizeable back patio that will be landscaped and ready to go as soon as possible.

Collins said he couldn’t be more excited to own one of the legacy businesses that define St. Paul.

“This is a name that’s been around for 75 years,” Collins said. “I think that’s one of the things that sets St. Paul apart is that there are all these places that have been around for so many years.”

Alary’s: 139 E. Seventh St., St. Paul; facebook.com/AlarysBarMN

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Metro Transit to debut St. Paul-to-Woodbury Gold Line on March 22, 2025

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Metro Transit will debut the downtown St. Paul-to-Woodbury “Gold Line” — the state’s first bus rapid transit line to operate primarily within bus-only lanes — on March 22, 2025, according to an announcement from project leaders.

The Gold Line is one of three new BRT lines that Metro Transit will roll out next year, bringing the transit system’s total to eight BRT lines. The B Line, which will largely replace the Route 21 between Uptown, Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul, will launch on June 14, 2025.

The Metro E Line, which will largely replace Route 6 between Bloomington and the University of Minnesota East Bank campus, is scheduled to begin service in December of next year.

Construction of the Gold Line and a new bridge connecting Oakdale and Woodbury began in late 2022 and is currently more than 40% complete. Also under construction is a three-level, 500-space Park & Ride near the intersection of Woodlane Drive and Guider Drive in Woodbury.

When completed, buses will travel in dedicated lanes for about 70% of the 10-mile route, serving stops in St. Paul, Maplewood, Landfall, Oakdale and Woodbury. The $505.3 million project is largely funded by the Federal Transit Administration and Ramsey and Washington counties.

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Nighttime gunshots may harm health and sleep of millions, Mass General study finds

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Nighttime gunshots and the sirens wailing right after may be a larger factor in the health and well-being of millions of people than previously considered, Mass General Brigham researchers report.

The study looked at 72,236 gunshot reports from big cities — including Boston.

“A nighttime gunshot likely disrupts the sleep of nearby community residents due to the sheer sound of the shot, which is then followed by a cacophony of sirens from police vehicles and ambulances,” said Rebecca Robbins, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and one author of the study. “The findings from our study shed light on this potentially significant and underexplored social determinant of sleep and population health.”

The report, titled “Estimating Community Disruption from Nighttime Gunshots in 6 U.S. Cities, 2015 to 2021,” explores how many people hear gunshots during the nighttime, how many nighttime shots are heard and the demographics of the most impacted communities.

Of the most populated U.S. city, researchers were only able to access enough gunshot data for Boston; Philadelphia; Washington D.C.; Baltimore; Portland, Oregon; and New York. In total, the team looked at 72,236 gunshot reports from 2015 to 2021.

The work builds on research looking into the “potential for an exponentially broader community impact” of gun violence than the “staggering” number of direct casualties in the U.S., a release from MGH states.

Overall, the study concluded that gunshots were far more prevalent at night — 72% of the shots across the cities occurred during nighttime — and there may be an estimated 12.5 million individual instances of a person hearing a gunshot in just the six cities annually.

As median household income went up, the study concluded, rates of nearby nighttime gunshots went down.

“Nighttime gunshots may be an additional environmental hindrance to sleep, health, and well-being, particularly in economically vulnerable neighborhoods,” the study concludes. “A greater understanding of the ubiquity of nighttime gun violence in underserved communities, presented here, may inspire future research and practical efforts to forge inter-disciplinary care teams to support communities impacted by these events.”

Boston was excluded from the geographic and income analysis of people impacted because the city does not release specific enough gunshot data.

Boston ran in the middle of the cities measured, with about 919 nighttime gunshots a year and between 1.6 million and 10.1 million individual instances of a person being in range to hear a nighttime gunshot. The city also had the highest rate of shots at night, with 80% of gunshots happening during the nighttime over the time period.

The Boston neighborhood most impacted by nighttime gunshots was Roxbury, the study noted, and the least was Charlestown.

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The team plans to continue the research and “study sleep disturbances in response to nighttime gunshots as they work to design community-based sleep interventions to support individuals in communities with high incidences,” the release said.

“The traumatic ripple effects from gunshots can extend across families and entire communities,” co-author Chana Sacks, a researcher from Massachusetts General Hospital. “Our work helps to broaden how we think about who is impacted by these events.”