Ramsey County has named Alex Kotze as its deputy county manager and chief operating officer with her role beginning Dec. 1.

Kotze, currently the county’s chief financial officer, will lead the county’s newly established Operations Service Team. She has served as the county’s CFO since 2020, managing the county’s $870 million operating budget.

“She brings a strong track record of service in both state and county government, with a deep understanding that effective internal operations are critical to ensuring we operate as One Ramsey County in service to our community,” said County Manager Ling Becker in a statement. “Her depth of experience, values and leadership will strengthen our collective efforts to build a more efficient, collaborative, and resident-centered organization.”

After joining the county in 2020, Kotze later served as interim deputy county manager of the Health and Wellness Service Team from 2024 to July 2025, where she oversaw Social Services, Community Corrections and other departments.

As part of 2025 supplemental budget discussions, county officials have decided to restructure, with the new system taking effect Jan. 1. This will reduce the size of the county’s Health and Wellness Service Team and sunset the county’s Strategic Team and Information and Public Records Service Team.

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Kotze will oversee and develop strategy for county departments that support property management, finance and information services as the county restructures its internal operations team.

Before joining the county, Kotze served as the Minnesota Department of Human Services’ chief financial officer and as fiscal and policy administrator for Milwaukee County’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Kotze has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota, and a master’s in public policy from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

By LAURAN NEERGAARD and SHELBY LUM, Associated Press

“My year of unraveling” is how a despairing Christy Morrill described nightmarish months when his immune system hijacked his brain.

What’s called autoimmune encephalitis attacks the organ that makes us “us,” and it can appear out of the blue.

Morrill went for a bike ride with friends along the California coast, stopping for lunch, and they noticed nothing wrong. Neither did Morrill until his wife asked how it went — and he’d forgotten. Morrill would get worse before he got better. “Unhinged” and “fighting to see light,” he wrote as delusions set in and holes in his memory grew.

Christy Morrill, 72, who lost decades of memories to autoimmune encephalitis, poses for a photo at his home, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, in San Carlos, Calif. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Of all the ways our immune system can run amok and damage the body instead of protecting it, autoimmune encephalitis is one of the most unfathomable. Seemingly healthy people abruptly spiral with confusion, memory loss, seizures, even psychosis.

But doctors are getting better at identifying it, thanks to discoveries of a growing list of the rogue antibodies responsible that, if found in blood and spinal fluid, aid diagnosis. Every year new culprit antibodies are being uncovered, said Dr. Sam Horng, a neurologist at Mount Sinai Health System in New York who has cared for patients with multiple forms of this mysterious disease.

And while treatment today involves general ways to fight the inflammation, two major clinical trials are underway aiming for more targeted therapy.

Still, it’s tricky. Symptoms can be mistaken for psychiatric or other neurologic disorders, delaying proper treatment.

“When someone’s having new changes in their mental status, they’re worsening and if there’s sort of like a bizarre quality to it, that’s something that kind of tips our suspicion,” Horng said. “It’s important not to miss a treatable condition.”

Christy Morrill, 72, left, who lost decades of memories to autoimmune encephalitis, looks over family photo albums with, from left, his wife Karen, daughter Caitlin and grandson Colter, at his home, Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025, in San Carlos, Calif. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

With early diagnosis and care, some patients fully recover. Others like Morrill recover normal daily functioning but grapple with some lasting damage — in his case, lost decades of “autobiographical” memories. This 72-year-old literature major can still spout facts and figures learned long ago, and he makes new memories every day. But even family photos can’t help him recall pivotal moments in his own life.

“I remember ‘Ulysses’ is published in Paris in 1922 at Sylvia Beach’s bookstore. Why do I remember that, which is of no use to me anymore, and yet I can’t remember my son’s wedding?” Morrill wonders.

Inflaming the brain

Encephalitis means the brain is inflamed and symptoms can vary from mild to life-threatening. Infections are a common cause, typically requiring treatment of the underlying virus or bacteria. But when that’s ruled out, an autoimmune cause has to be considered, Horng said, especially when symptoms arise suddenly.

The umbrella term autoimmune encephalitis covers a group of diseases with weird-sounding names based on the antibody fueling it, such as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.

While they’re not new diseases, that one got a name in 2007 when Dr. Josep Dalmau, then at the University of Pennsylvania, discovered the first culprit antibody, sparking a hunt for more.

Christy Morrill, 72, who lost decades of memories to autoimmune encephalitis, looks over a photo album of his son’s wedding, at his home, Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025, in San Carlos, Calif. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

That anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis tends to strike younger women and, one of the bizarre factors, it’s sometimes triggered by an ovarian “dermoid” cyst.

How? That type of cyst has similarities to some brain tissue, Horng explained. The immune system can develop antibodies recognizing certain proteins from the growth. If those antibodies get into the brain, they can mistakenly target NMDA receptors on healthy brain cells, sparking personality and behavior changes that can include hallucinations.

Different antibodies create different problems depending if they mostly hit memory and mood areas in the brain, or sensory and movement regions.

Altogether, “facets of personhood seem to be impaired,” Horng said.

Therapies include filtering harmful antibodies out of patients’ blood, infusing healthy ones, and high-dose steroids to calm inflammation.

Stealth attack on the brain

Those cyst-related antibodies stealthily attacked Kiara Alexander in Charlotte, North Carolina, who’d never heard of the brain illness. She’d brushed off some oddities — a little forgetfulness, zoning out a few minutes — until she found herself in an ambulance because of a seizure.

Kiara Alexander, who was hospitalized with autoimmune encephalitis, poses for a photo at her home, Friday, Oct. 10, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Maybe dehydration, the first hospital concluded. At a second hospital after a second seizure, a doctor recognized the possible signs, ordering a spinal tap that found the culprit antibodies.

As Alexander’s treatment began, other symptoms ramped up. She has little clear memory of the monthlong hospital stay: “They said I would just wake up screaming. What I could remember, it was like a nightmare, like the devil trying to catch me.”

Later Alexander would ask about her 9-year-old daughter and when she could go home — only to forget the answer and ask again.

Alexander feels lucky she was diagnosed quickly, and she got the ovarian cyst removed. But it took over a year to fully recover and return to work full time.

Kiara Alexander, left, who was hospitalized with autoimmune encephalitis, leaves a grocery store with her daughter Kennedi, Friday, Oct. 10, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

What could cause memories to vanish?

In San Carlos, California, in early 2020, it was taking months to determine what caused Morrill’s sudden memory problem. He remembered facts and spoke eloquently but was losing recall of personal events, a weird combination that prompted Dr. Michael Cohen, a neurologist at Sutter Health, to send him for more specialized testing.

“It’s very unusual, I mean extremely unusual, to just complain of a problem with autobiographical memory,” Cohen said. “One has to think about unusual disorders.”

Meanwhile Morrill’s wife, Karen, thought she’d detected subtle seizures — and one finally happened in front of another doctor, helping spur a spinal tap and diagnosis of LGI1-antibody encephalitis.

It’s a type most common in men over age 50. Those rogue antibodies disrupt how neurons signal each other, and MRI scans showed they’d targeted a key memory center.

By then Morrill, who’d spent retirement guiding kayak tours, could no longer safely get on the water. He’d quit reading and as his treatments changed, he’d get agitated with scary delusions.

“I lost total mental capacity and fell apart,” Morrill describes it.

He used haiku to make sense of the incomprehensible, and months into treatment finally wondered if the “meds coursing through me” really were “dousing the fire. Rays of hope?”

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A growing list of culprits

The nonprofit patient advocacy group Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance lists about two dozen antibodies — and counting — known to play a role in these brain illnesses so far.

Clinical trials, offered at major medical centers around the country, are testing two drugs now used for other autoimmune diseases to see if tamping down antibody production can ease encephalitis.

More awareness of these rare diseases is critical, said North Carolina’s Alexander, who sought out fellow patients. “That’s a terrible feeling, feeling like you’re alone.”

As for Morrill, five years later he still grieves decades of lost memories: family gatherings, a year spent studying in Scotland, the travel with his wife.

But he’s making new memories with grandkids, is back outdoors — and leads an AE Alliance support group, using his haiku to illustrate the journey from his “unraveling” to “the present is what I have, daybreaks and sunsets” to, finally, “I can sustain hope.”

“I’m reentering some real time of fun, joy,” Morrill said. “I wasn’t shooting for that. I just wanted to be alive.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A former Bethel University football player acquitted in two 2019 sexual assault cases involving fellow students has now had a third one dismissed, with the prosecution saying they would be unable to prove the charge beyond a reasonable doubt if the case went to trial.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office on Monday dismissed its last case against Gideon Osamwonyi Erhabor, who was charged with third-degree criminal sexual conduct and alleged to have assaulted a then-19-year-old woman at a house party in Roseville on Oct. 7, 2018.

The three cases were filed against Erhabor on Dec. 3, 2019, after the women reported to law enforcement on separate days in June 2019 that Erhabor had assaulted them in the fall and winter of 2018.

Erhabor was a student at the Christian college in Arden Hills from the fall of 2017 to fall 2018, when he was a running back on the football team. He moved back to his hometown of McKinney, Texas.

Ramsey County sheriff’s deputies interviewed Erhabor about the incidents in August 2019. While he acknowledged having sex with the three women, he said all the interactions were consensual, according to the criminal complaints.

He was arrested in his Texas hometown a day after the charges were filed and released from the Ramsey County jail after posting a $30,000 bond about a month later.

A jury in October 2022 found Erhabor not guilty of third-degree criminal sexual conduct for an incident with a then-21-year-old at a house party in Shoreview on Dec. 8, 2018.

In June, following a bench trial before Judge Joy Bartscher, Erhabor was acquitted of third- and fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct for an incident with a then-18-year-old woman in his dorm room on Sept. 11, 2018.

In her ruling, the judge wrote the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the interaction between the two was nonconsensual.

On Thursday, Erhabor’s attorney, assistant public defender Daniel Gonnerman, who represented the now 27-year-old in all three cases, said, “They’re finally over.”

“I appreciate that the prosecutor decided to take an objective view of the evidence and review the case, and decided not to pursue the case any further,” he added.

In a Thursday statement, the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office said the decision to dismiss “was made after a thorough review of the evidence and our inability to meet our burden of proving each element of the criminal charge beyond a reasonable doubt as required by law.

“While we acknowledge the immediate disappointment for the victim in this case, we do not want this decision to hinder in any way victims of sexual assault in our community from reporting their assault to law enforcement.”

‘Not sure what happened’

The dismissed complaint gives the following account:

The woman reported to Ramsey County Sheriff’s investigators on June 7, 2019, that she had arrived at the off-campus house party on Oct. 7, 2018, and drank  two strawberry-flavored alcohol canned drinks. She said she went outside and is “not sure what happened to her after that,” the complaint read.

The next morning, she woke up at a friend’s apartment wearing only a T-shirt and no underwear and was confused as to what happened the night before.

About seven weeks later, on Nov. 30, Erhabor went into her dorm room uninvited and climbed into bed with her. When she asked Erhabor what he thought he was doing, he said he was trying to play with her. She told him to stop, that she was not going to do anything sexual with him, to which he replied, “Why, it wasn’t like he had not seen ‘it’ before,” the complaint read.

When she asked him what he meant, Erhabor said they had sex in a bathroom the night of the October house party, and that he thought she didn’t like it because she had fallen asleep.

During the investigation, one student reported seeing the woman at the party and that she seemed fine at the start, but was stumbling and slurring her words about an hour or two later.

Another student said he brought the woman to his friend’s apartment to watch her because she had thrown up. He said that when she awoke the next morning, she was confused and not able to recall the previous night.

‘This experience tested my faith’

In September, Gonnerman, Erhabor’s attorney, challenged probable cause that he committed the alleged offense and asked for the case to be dismissed.

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Gonnerman wrote in the motion to the court that the woman testified in Erhabor’s jury trial in his other case that “she had no recollection of what occurred but speculated that she would not have consented to sexual conduct with Defendant.”

No one else witnessed the alleged crime, Gonnerman wrote, adding the prosecution “has no confession of a crime by Defendant nor any evidence that a crime occurred.”

Gonnerman said he emailed Erhabor about the dismissal on Monday and he “expressed great gratitude to me that I’ve helped him through this process.”

Gonnerman said Erhabor gave him permission to share the email, which read: “This experience tested my faith, my resilience and my ability to keep moving forward even when it felt like everything was against me. I’m focused on rebuilding my peace, moving forward with my life, and continuing to grow as a person. I’m grateful to finally be able to look ahead with clarity and optimism.”

By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN, Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — One of North America’s longest rivers, the Rio Grande — or Rio Bravo as it’s called in Mexico — has a history as deep as it is long. Indigenous people have tapped it for countless generations and it was a key artery for Spanish conquistadors centuries ago.

Today, the Rio Grande-Bravo water basin is in crisis.

Research published Thursday says the situation arguably is worse than challenges facing the Colorado River, another vital lifeline for western U.S. states that have yet to chart a course for how best to manage that dwindling resource.

Without rapid and large-scale action on both sides of the border, the researchers warn that unsustainable use threatens water security for millions of people who rely on the binational basin. They say more prevalent drying along the Rio Grande and persistent shortages could have catastrophic consequences for farmers, cities and ecosystems.

The study done by World Wildlife Fund, Sustainable Waters and a team of university researchers provides a full accounting of the consumptive uses as well as evaporation and other losses within the Rio Grande-Bravo basin. It helps to paint the most complete — and most alarming — picture yet of why the river system is in trouble.

FILE – A family takes a walk in the Rio Grande’s dry riverbed in Albuquerque, N.M., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)

Unsustainable

The basin provides drinking water to 15 million people in the U.S. and Mexico and irrigates nearly 2 million acres of cropland in the two countries.

The research shows only 48% of the water consumed directly or indirectly within the basin is replenished naturally. The other 52% is unsustainable, meaning reservoirs, aquifers and the river itself will be overdrawn.

“That’s a pretty daunting, challenging reality when half of our water isn’t necessarily going to be reliable for the future,” said Brian Richter, president of Sustainable Waters and a senior fellow with the World Wildlife Fund. “So we have to really address that.”

By breaking down the balance sheet, the researchers are hopeful policymakers and regulators can determine where water use can be reduced and how to balance supply with demand.

Warnings of what was to come first cropped up in the late 19th century when irrigation in Colorado’s San Luis Valley began to dry the snowmelt-fed river, resulting in diminished flows as far south as El Paso, Texas. Now, some stretches of the river run dry for months at a time. The Big Bend area and even Albuquerque have seen dry cracked mud replace the river more often in recent years.

Irrigating crops by far is the largest direct use of water in the basin at 87%, according to the study. Meanwhile, indirect losses like evaporation account for more than half of overall consumption in the basin, a factor that can’t be dismissed as reservoir storage shrinks.

The Pecos River is shown near Loving, N.M., Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Vanishing farms

The irrigation season has become shorter, with canals drying up as early as June in some cases, despite a growing season in the U.S. and Mexico that typically lasts through October.

In central New Mexico, farmers got a boost with summer rains. However, farmers along the Texas portion of the Pecos River and in the Rio Conchos basin of Mexico — both tributaries of the Rio Grande — did not receive any surface water supplies.

“A key part of this is really connecting the urban populations to what’s going on out on these farms. These farmers are really struggling. A lot of them are on the brink of bankruptcy,” Richter said, linking water shortages to shrinking farms, smaller profits and less ability to afford labor and equipment.

The analysis found that between 2000-2019, water shortages contributed to the loss of 18% of farmland in the headwaters in Colorado, 36% along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and 49% in the Pecos River tributary in New Mexico and Texas.

With fewer farms, less water went to irrigation in the U.S. However, researchers said irrigation in the Mexican portion of the basin has increased greatly.

The World Wildlife Fund and Sustainable Waters are working with researchers at the University of New Mexico to survey farmers on solutions to the water crisis.

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A raft of solutions

The responses to overuse and depletion are as varied as the jurisdictions through which the river flows, said Enrique Prunes, a co-author of the study and the manager of the World Wildlife Fund’s Rio Grande Program.

He pointed to Colorado, where water managers have threatened to shut off groundwater wells if the aquifer that supports irrigated farms cannot be stabilized. There, farmers who pump groundwater pay fees that are used to incentivize other farmers to fallow their fields.

New Mexico’s fallowing program is voluntary, but changes could be in store if the U.S. Supreme Court signs off on proposed settlements stemming from a long-running dispute with Texas and the federal government over management of the Rio Grande and groundwater use. New Mexico has acknowledged it will have to curb groundwater pumping.

New Mexico is behind in its water deliveries to Texas under an interstate compact, while Mexico owes water to the U.S. under a 1944 binational treaty. Researchers said meeting those obligations won’t get easier.

Prunes said policymakers must also consider the environment when crafting solutions.

“Rebalancing the system also means maintaining those basic functions that the river and the aquifers and the groundwater-dependent ecosystems have,” he said. “And that’s the indicator of resilience to a future of less water.”