Gazette Daily News Podcast, February 16
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Wednesday, February 16th.
If you have been enjoying the warmer weather the last few days, sorry it’s going to get a bit colder Wednesday night and Thursday, and that cold will come with precipitation. According to the National Weather Service rain is likely Wednesday in the Cedar Rapids area, primarily falling between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. The high will be 45 degrees in the morning, but that will drop to 35 degrees by 5 p.m. and drop to the teens by Wednesday night. Rain could return again Wednesday night, and with the temperatures dropping it will likely be either freezing rain or turn into snow. It will also be windy, with gusts as high as 30 mph.
The size, scope, and cost of a new University of Iowa wrestling training facility has swelled since it was announced two years ago due to now including women’s facilities. In September Iowa became the first NCAA Division I Power Five conference school to offer women’s wrestling.
The original project cost of $17.3 million has increased 53 percent, to $26.5 million, according to documents provided to the Board of Regents, which next week will consider approving the project design, description and budget.
The new two-story facility will include women’s and men’s locker rooms, strength and conditioning space, a two-story wrestling room, training and therapy rooms, a coach office suite, recruiting room, student-athlete lounge and an underground tunnel leading to Carver-Hawkeye Arena — where the wrestlers compete.
When University of Iowa Health Care eventually builds a new inpatient tower on its main Iowa City campus, officials intend to name it in honor of the late Richard O. Jacobson, whose foundation recently committed $70 million to the project.
That gift, according to the UI Center for Advancement, is the largest in the university’s 175-year history and brings Jacobson’s total lifetime support to more than $86 million — including gifts to the UI football program, the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center and the Iowa Reading Research Center.
The Board of Regents next week will consider approving the Jacobson name for the new inpatient tower, which officials have said will help a cramped UI Health Care “meet the complex care needs of all Iowans, allowing them to receive high-quality care without leaving the state.”
Jacobson died in 2016 at age 79. He started a warehouse business in 1968 that grew into a shipping business employing thousands.
A 19-year-old Cedar Rapids man — charged last week in the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old Illinois girl in July — had been convicted a month earlier for trafficking stolen weapons, but he was out on probation after receiving a deferred judgment.
Marshawn Rome Jackson, according to court documents, had at least two previous convictions, including being on juvenile probation Oct. 14, 2020, when he picked up his first adult conviction for stealing a vehicle. Officers were able to connect him to that crime by his electronic GPS monitor, which was ordered as part of his juvenile probation.
Jackson pleaded to a lesser charge of operating a vehicle without the owner’s consent and was sentenced to 30 days in jail last February.
Jackson is accused of fatally shooting 15-year-old Tyliyah L. Whitis of Peoria, Ill., who was found dead in the driver’s seat of her sister’s car July 21, 2021.
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Support for this news update was provided by New Pioneer Food Co-op. Celebrating 50 years as Eastern Iowa’s destination for locally and responsibly sourced groceries with stores in Iowa City, Coralville and Cedar Rapids; and online through Co-op Cart at newpi.coop.
