Gazette Daily News Briefing, July 8
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Wednesday, July 8th.
Wednesday looks like it just may be the hottest day of the week. According to the National Weather Service, it will be sunny and hot in the Cedar Rapids area on Wednesday with a high of 95 degrees. The heat index when humidity is added in could make that 95 degrees feel as hot as 102 degrees. There also won’t be much help from the wind, with wind speeds hovering between 5 and 10 mph.
More details were revealed after a Cedar Rapids woman survived being stabbed multiple times by her husband Monday morning. According to court documents released Tuesday, police investigators believe that 30-year-old Anthony Depolis bought a knife specifically to stab and kill his wife, Diana. Despite suffering a serious stab wound to her neck and defensive wounds on her arms, Diana Depolis was in stable condition on Tuesday. Police say after investigating the crime scene they discovered the knife used in the stabbing, and Anthony Depolis admitted to stabbing his wife. He now faces charges of attempted murder, willful injury and assault while displaying a dangerous weapon (domestic abuse).
After several weeks of increased positive counts for COVID-19 in Iowa, hospitalizations have started to increase as well. Hospitalizations have risen from 134 patients July 3 to 165 patients on Tuesday, with patients in intensive care rising from 41 to 44, and patients on ventilators rising from 15 to 20. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has said the state is monitoring the situation, particularly in the 10 counties that are seeing marked increases in the past several weeks.
If you felt the need to make an angry complaint to police about the amount of fireworks going off last week, you were not alone. Police departments in both Johnson and Linn Counties reported calls for firework complaints that were double, triple, and even quadruple what they see for a usual 4th of July. Coralville Police Chief Shane Kron told the Gazette that anecdotally it wasn’t just the amount of fireworks that was bothering people this year, it was the volume.
“They seemed to be bigger this year,” Kron said. “Everybody that called in talked about huge explosions. These are not people with bottle rockets; this was a lot bigger.”
In 2017 the Iowa Legislature legalized the sale and use of consumer fireworks in Iowa, but allowed local cities and counties to regulate when or if people could set them off in their jurisdiction around the holiday.
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