Gazette Daily News Briefing, September 3 and September 4
Welcome to Labor Day Weekend!
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Saturday, September 3, and Sunday, September 4.
Some cooler weather is arriving just in time for the long weekend. According to the National Weather Service it will be partly sunny with a slight chance for rain after 1 p.m. on Saturday in the Cedar Rapids area. The high temperature will be near 80 degrees. On Sunday it will be partly sunny with a high near 77 degrees. And on Labor Day Monday it will be mostly sunny, with a high near 82 degrees.
After weeks of confusion and uncertainty, dog owners in the Benton County town of Keystone were served written notices to remove their “pitbulls” from town.
The Benton County Sheriff’s Office served written notices to dog owners on Friday before the holiday weekend. The county and the city of Keystone have breed-specific ordinances banning pitbulls.
MaKinzie Brecht, a Keystone resident and pit bull owner, said she and a few other residents have received official notices from the City of Keystone and the Benton County Sheriff’s office.
The notice states that if the owner “fails to remove the dog as directed and within the prescribed time” of three days, “the City of Keystone will take such steps as necessary to remove said animal from the city limits.”
The notice states that those served have two days to appeal after receiving the notice. The notices arrived on Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. Brecht said the dog owners in Keystone have collectively hired a lawyer to deal with this situation moving forward.
A Marion man, who had his conviction of killing his former girlfriend overturned in 2020, waived his right to a jury trial and will have a bench trial — meaning the judge will determine the verdict — later this month.
Greg Davis, 30, charged with first-degree murder, told 6th Judicial District Judge Sean McPartland that he knowingly and voluntarily waived a jury trial during a pretrial hearing Friday. He also will submit a written waiver to the court.
Davis will again claim insanity or diminished capacity as his defense in the second trial, which starts Sept. 13 in Linn County District Court.
Davis was convicted of first-degree murder by a Linn County jury in 2018 but the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the verdict in a 4-3 decision in 2020. The justices found the trial judge — McPartland — failed to instruct the jury regarding Davis' insanity or diminished capacity defense on the first-degree murder charge, which meant jurors couldn’t consider it as part of their verdict.
According to the Associated Press, NASA aimed for a Saturday launch of its new moon rocket, after fixing fuel leaks and working around a bad engine sensor that foiled the first try.
The inaugural flight of the 322-foot rocket — the most powerful ever built by NASA — was delayed late in the countdown Monday.
Atop the rocket is a crew capsule with three test dummies that will fly around the moon and back over the course of six weeks — NASA's first such attempt since the Apollo program 50 years ago.
NASA wants to wring out the spacecraft before strapping in astronauts on the next planned flight in two years.
There is also a local tie to the moon missions. Collins Aerospace, Cedar Rapids’ largest employer, signed a contract with Lockheed Martin in 2020 to provide systems to support NASA’s Orion spacecraft fleet for Artemis missions III through VIII, the avionics company said on its website.
Collins Aerospace, along with two other companies, also is designing NASA’s next-generation spacesuit for astronauts.
