Crime & Safety

Clay Waller will go to trial in Cape Girardeau County, but the jury will be imported from elsewhere in the state.

Waller was in Cape Girardeau County Court on Monday, and judge Ben Lewis set the dates for Waller’s murder trial for September 9 through September 20, 2013.

Waller’s defense attorney requested the trial be moved to another county due to intense local media attention.

Instead, the jury will come from Cole County in central Missouri. Jury selection will be held there on September the fifth and sixth.

Prescription drug abuse in on the rise nationwide, and Missouri is increasingly becoming a supplier of illicit pharmaceuticals.

Missouri is the only state that does not have a prescription drug monitoring program. 

Scott Collier is the DEA’s Diversion Program Manager in St. Louis. Collier says monitoring systems allow physicians to see if an individual has gone to multiple doctors within the past few days seeking the same prescription.

The suspect who attempted to blow up the New York Federal Reserve Bank has ties to southeast Missouri.

The FBI arrested Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis on Wednesday when he tried to ignite 1,000 pounds of inert explosives.

Nafis studied at Southeast Missouri State University for one semester.

The 21-year old attended Southeast in the spring 2012 semester. He is no longer enrolled at the university.

Nafis took 12 hours of entry level classes at Southeast. Nafis aspired to study cyber security but never took any upper level courses.

One man is dead after an early morning car chase Tuesday in Cape Girardeau.

Police were called to a disturbance at 618 North Street where witnesses say one man threatened another with a gun. The man, now identified as James Pyles, fled the scene in a vehicle. Two patrol cars chased Pyles at slow speeds, who stopped at stop signs and used his turn signal while police were in pursuit.

All that changed when Pyles turned off Cape Rock Drive and onto Perryville Road, where Pyles accelerated at a high rate of speed, according to patrolman Darin Hickey.

A southern Illinois judge decided in favor of a prison workers union on Wednesday and against the State of Illinois in the ongoing battle over facility closures.

That will keep the Tamms Supermax prison open for the foreseeable future.

Judge Charles Cavaness upheld an arbitrator’s findings that the state violated its contract with the union by moving to close facilities prior to the conclusion of impact bargaining.

The judge also found that closing corrections facilities would create an unsafe work environment in the state’s remaining prisons.