By Casey Jarmes | The News-Review
I’ve been doing these monthly “One Year” columns for half a year now, always covering a year from decades before I began working at this paper, usually decades before I was even born. This week, though, I am doing news stories that I remember, because they came from 2023, the first full year I worked for this paper. And, to be self-deprecating, I was a terrible writer three years ago.
I remember the day the biggest story of that year came very well. It was March 31. It had been a slow news week, and I kept complaining to Katie about having nothing to write. Then, on Friday, the sky turned green, that dark, sickly green all Iowans know to fear. I have since been banned from mentioning when it is a slow week.
I hid in a basement, as 136 mph winds tore through Iowa. Around 19 different homes in this county were destroyed after two separate tornadoes, one EF3 and one EF4, tore through the county. That weekend, I drove around the countryside, staring at the devastation, interviewing those who had lost everything. The southwest part of the county was covered in houses reduced to rubble. I saw a pile of 200 dead pigs lying there, rotting in a ditch, next to one farm. Family farms, owned for generations, were obliterated. I was particularly moved by the story of Jon Roop and Judy Dietrich. Their house was torn away by the storm as they hid in the basement, behind a brick wall. Roop told me that the wall came loose, as he leaned against it, bracing himself from the wind; the wall was lying there, at a 60 degree angle, when I arrived. Marianne Millikin described her son opening the basement door, after the wind died down, and seeing that the entire house was gone.
The thing that struck me was that, at every farm I stopped by, I saw an army of people helping dig through the wreckage. Friends, neighbors, kids from local schools, everyone who could help did help. Millikin said 125 people, some of them practical strangers who had only spoken to her family once or twice, coming out to help. “How wonderful this community we’ve got. Within minutes, this place was covered in people who wanted to help. It’s just amazing,” said farmer Andrew VanDeHaar.
No person was killed by the storm, thankfully. Keota High School put on a humorous play about superheroes a few days later; the play had originally been scheduled for the 31st, and gave some much needed humor in that dark week. The church I attend also managed to put on a Living Last Supper play a week later; there was heavy worry that this was going to be cancelled due to the actor who played Phillip being busy working 16-hour shifts getting power back on.
The second big news story came in June. Years of poor record keeping left no one in Richland sure who legally owned the fire department, with the city and township both claiming ownership. Tensions blazed over after disagreements between Fire Chief Mitch Ehrenfelt and certain members of the city council over insurance physicals and a new fire station resulted in Ehrenfelt saying that he worked for the township, not the city. Three members of the city council responded by firing Ehrenfelt. Infamously, they officially approved this as “accepting Ehrenfelt’s resignation,” despite Ehrenfelt having never resigned.
Ehrenfelt ignored this “firing” and continued working as fire chief, arguing that the city didn’t have the authority to remove him. After several heated meetings, the parties involved decided the only way forward was to wait until after the fall election, in hopes that a new council would get along better with the fire department. In the fall, two of the three council members who tried to remove Ehrenfelt lost reelection; the city also got a new mayor, firefighter John Capps.
In other local government news, the City of Sigourney hired a code enforcer, added cameras to the square, and dealt with constant issues with the Façade project on the south side of the square. The City of Keota decided against switching garbage companies and investigated a council member for an alleged conflict of interest, ultimately exonerating him. Over the summer and spring of 2023, the Keota pool was constructed, following years of fundraising from the community. However, work on the pool was completed too late for a pool season, leading the formal opening to be pushed back to 2024. Still, the pool was opened for one day, on Sept. 10.
The final big story of that year came on October 14, the night of the infamous hayride crash. A Halloween party was held at Griffith Park in What Cheer, featuring a hayride through the gravel roads of Keokuk County. During this ride, the driver, Dan Brubaker, swerved into a ditch, injuring thirteen children and hospitalizing three. Brubaker and David Heady, who rode passenger in during the hayride, would later be arrested for child endangerment in December, 2024 and sentenced in September and October of 2025 respectively. Our initial reporting, right after the accident, was sparse on details, but the story of the event would come out over the following weeks. I did manage to do an interview with Reanna Robb and Collin MacCready, two college students who were at the party, who described the heavy drinking before the hayride, the horrors at the crash site, and an overhead conversation where Heady and Brubaker discussed lying to the police about what happened.
“All those kids laying in different positions on both sides of the ditch, just like crying and screaming. People were trying to check if there was real blood or fake blood on them because they were just at a haunted attraction. It was sick…it was straight up like something you would see out of a horror movie…This wasn’t just a couple kids. This was every child that was pretty much on there was out in the ditch in some way. There were kids grabbing themselves, like their legs, some of them were grabbing their arms in funny ways…I saw limbs in places they shouldn’t be, because of the way they were flown off, I’m guessing,” Robb recounted.
On Jan. 21, Keota held a district speech competition. In January, a state criminal investigation began for Windsor Place Senior Living Campus in Sigourney, after a resident was found in a vegetative state, after the staff allegedly ignored her screams of pain and pleas to be taken to a hospital after suffering a stroke in November of 2022. On Jan. 24 the state implemented school vouchers, despite widespread backlash from public schools across the state.
Sigourney wrestler Reannah Utterback placed eighth in the state wrestling tournament, only the second female wrestler to place on the state podium against boys in Iowa history. On March 3, Country Junction opened in Richland. On Mar. 17, Sigourney High School drama students performed “You Can’t Take it With You.” In May, Keota was designated a Heart Safe school. On May 26, Sigourney softball pitcher Carly Goodwin struck out 17/21 English Valleys players, leading to a 9-0 victory. On May 31, the Sigourney School Board approved issuing $7,500,000 in bonds to fund the work overhauling the elementary school that began summer 2024.
In June, the City of Keota celebrated its 150th anniversary. On June 7, ground was broken for the new Richland daycare. On June 26, a car crashed through the wall of the new Public Health office, delaying the move to there from the court house; no one was hurt. On July 6, Chloe Zittergruen was crowned Keokuk County Fair Queen. On July 7, Zaylee Hunter and Colsyn Bruns were named Little Miss and Mr. Keokuk County, respectively. On July 13, Autumn Belvel was crowned Expo Queen. On July 24, State Senator Adrian Dickey was arrested during RAGBRAI; the charges were later dropped. Also on July 23, Keota Police Chief Dog Conrad resigned. On Aug. 18, “What Cheer: Coal, Clay, & Community,” a documentary directed by Jacob Glandon, premiered at the What Cheer Opera House. On Aug. 20, Dick and Merla Morse were inducted into the Iowa 4-H Hall of Fame. On Oct. 18, the City of Sigourney hired a new police chief, who subsequently retired in 2024. On Oct. 19, Keota drama students performed a series of short plays. On Oct. 27, Tri-County students performed the Vince Hrasky written play “Romeo & Juliet 2: Zombie Apocalypse. In November, Pekin students performed “Beauty and the Beast.” On Nov. 15, the Sigourney School Board approved creating a girls wrestling team. In December, Pekin retired the jersey number of alum and professional baseball player Keaton Winn.
In the final months of the year, the county received repeated visits from Republican presidential hopefuls, including: a meet and greet from Asa Hutchinson that featured a number of attendees I could count on one hand, including me and Hutchinson; two Vivek Ramaswamy rallies in a single week, which was very repetitive; and a packed Ron DeSantis rally at Grant Ranch. At that last one, DeSantis stated that, if he was elected, he would begin arresting and deporting immigrants who attended protests over the U.S. government’s funding of the Gazan Genocide. I will never forget how loudly I heard people cheer at the idea of abolishing the first amendment and criminalizing criticizing the government.
