CANTON, S.D. – A 21-year-old Davis man who was behind the wheel during a December crash near Beresford has been charged for the deaths of the three passengers.
Hayden Hall is now facing three counts of second-degree murder, three counts of first-degree manslaughter and ingestion of a controlled substance (cocaine) in a motor vehicle. He is currently being held in the Minnehaha County Jail.
On Friday, Lincoln County State’s Attorney Thomas Wollman announced that a grand jury had returned an indictment against Hall with the charges.
“One of our Lincoln County Grand Juries has returned an indictment against Hayden Hall for charges to include murder of the second-degree, manslaughter of the first-degree, and ingestion of a controlled substance Benzoylecgonine, or the metabolite of cocaine,” Wollman said.
On December 9, 2023, Hall was driving a 2014 Ram 1500 Sport pickup eastbound on 291st Street.
20-year-old Gerard Muller of Parker, 19-year-old Kaydence Nygaard of Beresford and 18-year-old Collin Hlavac of Irene were all passengers in the vehicle.
Sometime before 5 a.m., the vehicle left the roadway and went airborne over a driveway 10 miles northwest of Beresford. The vehicle landed in the south ditch and rolled.
The three passengers in the vehicle were all pronounced dead at the scene.
Hall fled the scene and was soon located and taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. None of the occupants were wearing seatbelts.
“This has been an ongoing investigation, approximately three months have elapsed since that traffic crash. It’s been a significant investigation to include forensic analysis of cell phones, forensic downloads of the vehicle event data crash recorder, and DNA evidence as well,” Wollman said Friday.
Hall will next be arraigned on these charges in Canton and he is currently facing other felony charges in Lincoln County, including child abuse from a previous matter as well as grand theft, which originated from the same morning the accident took place.
Second-degree murder is a charge that carries a mandatory life sentence.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Republican Congressman Randy Feenstra of Iowa has introduced a bill looking to protect long term solvency of social security.
The “Save Our Seniors Act” would require the Congressional Budget Office to include the honest projection of Social Security’s financial health in its 10-year economic outlook. Feenstra said this is to ensure the funds are made available for seniors.
“We have to protect and preserve our social security system. And thoroughly, the federal government sees that there’s an endless supply of dollars, this isn’t true,” Feenstra said. “That’s what my bill addresses is that the Congressional Budget Office have to understand that with eight in eight years, we’re going to run out of money for Social Security.”
Feenstra said spending is out of control and he wants to make smart economic decisions.
INDIANOPLIS, IN – The South Dakota State women’s basketball team was chosen as a No. 12 seed and will take on No. 5 Utah in the First Round of the NCAA Tournament on a neutral floor Saturday, March 23 in Spokane, Wash.
The winner of the SDSU/Utah meeting will take on the winner of No. 4 Gonzaga/No. 13 UC Irvine Monday. These games will be played at Gonzaga’s McCarthey Athletic Center.
SDSU is making its 12th trip to the NCAA Tournament in 16 seasons of postseason eligibility. The Jacks earned the Summit League’s automatic bid to the Big Dance by winning their 11th conference tournament trophy last week.
The Jackrabbit Ticket Office is now taking requests for the First and Second Rounds of the Women’s March Madness NCAA Basketball Tournament for Jackrabbit Club members only.
The deadline to make a request will be Monday, March 18, 2024 at 12 p.m. CST. Visit the following link to make a request: https://gojacks.co/3PoYcAj.
Due to a limited number of tickets allocated by the NCAA, requests do not guarantee tickets will be made available. If any tickets become available, requests will be fulfilled based on Jackrabbit Club priority point standings. Requests made by non-Jackrabbit Club members will not be considered.
Fans are encouraged to purchase tickets directly from Gonzaga. Tickets for the general public will go on sale Monday, March 18. More information is available at GoZags.com/NCAA.
Joshua Haiar, South Dakota Searchlight – The Oglala Sioux Tribe is receiving a boost in internet connectivity, thanks to a $35 million federal grant to develop high-speed access.
The move will benefit 3,300 people, 47 businesses, 55 farms and seven educational facilities across Bennett and Oglala Lakota counties on the Pine Ridge Reservation, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The funding will be allocated through the federal ReConnect Program and administered by Oglala Lakota Telecommunications.
Nikki Gronli oversees the department’s South Dakota rural development team.
“We’re creating more jobs because they’re expanding their telecommunications network and the entrepreneurship that comes with people having access to high-speed internet,” Gronli said.
The initiative is part of a broader investment totaling $58 million, targeting tribal communities in Nevada, Oklahoma and South Dakota to spur economic development and improve infrastructure.
PIERRE, S.D. – South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has signed a bill to allow signers of ballot initiative petitions to revoke their signatures — a move opponents decry as a jab at direct democracy and a proposed abortion rights initiative, which would enable voters to protect abortion rights in the state constitution.
The Republican governor signed the bill on Friday. The Republican-led Legislature overwhelmingly passed the bill brought by Republican Rep. Jon Hansen, who leads a group seeking to defeat the proposed initiative. Hansen said he brought the bill to counter misleading or fraudulent initiative tactics, alleging “multiple violations of our laws regarding circulation.”
“Inducing somebody into signing a petition through misleading information or fraud, that’s not democracy. That’s fraud,” Hansen said in an interview last month. “This upholds the ideal of democracy, and that is people deciding, one or the other, based on the truth of the matter.”
Republican lawmakers have grumbled about South Dakota’s initiative process, including Medicaid expansion, which voters approved in 2022.
Democrats tabbed Hansen’s bill as “changing the rules in the middle of the game,” and called it open to potential abuse, with sufficient laws already on the books to ensure initiatives are run properly.
Opponents also decry the bill’s emergency clause, giving it effect upon Noem’s signature, denying the opportunity for a referendum. Rick Weiland, who leads the abortion rights initiative, called the bill “another attack on direct democracy.”
“It’s pretty obvious that our legislature doesn’t respect the will of the voters or this long-held tradition of being able to petition our state government and refer laws that voters don’t like, pass laws that the Legislature refuses to move forward on, and amend our state constitution,” Weiland said.
South Dakota outlaws all abortions but to save the life of the mother.
The bill is “another desperate attempt to throw another hurdle, another roadblock” in the initiative’s path, Weiland said. Initiative opponents have sought to “convince people that they signed something that they didn’t understand,” he said.
If voters approve the proposed initiative, the state would be banned from regulating abortion in the first trimester. Regulations for the second trimester would be allowed “only in ways that are reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.”
Dakotans for Health has until May 7 to submit about 35,000 valid signatures to make the November ballot. Weiland said they have more than 50,000 signatures, 44,000 of them “internally validated.”
It’s unclear how the new law might affect the initiative. Weiland said he isn’t expecting mass revocations, but will see how the law is implemented.
The law requires signature withdrawal notifications be notarized and delivered by hand or registered mail to the secretary of state’s office before the petition is filed and certified.
LINCOLN, NE – The Nebraska legislative session is only 60 days long this year and the to-do list is still pretty long. At the top of the list, at least for the governor, is cutting property taxes down by 40%. But the clock is still ticking.
Many Nebraskans agree that something needs to be done about high property taxes. It’s what the Legislature’s Revenue Committee has been working on, and they’ll kick all of the tax reform packages onto the floor by next week.
It’s taken three-fourths of the legislative session, but Chair of the Revenue Committee State Sen. Lou Ann Linehan said that committee is rounding a corner.
In the long deliberations over a multi-layered set of tax and education packages, State Senator Lou Ann Linehan, the Chair of the Revenue Committee, says that all the work is rounding a corner and that the packages work in tandem to shift the burden onto sales taxes. She is cautiously optimistic that tax reform will pass through the chamber as they enter the final stretch of the session.
Gov. Jim Pillen said he’ll call a special session if the legislature doesn’t pass a plan to get property taxes down, but Sen. Linehan said that session would be hard to pull off, especially with elections this year. She said with a lot of legwork done in committee, most of the battle is over. Now it’s just time to wait and see how the Unicameral floor will receive the packages.
