Police are asking the public to help identify two individuals at an ATM machine on Feb. 10.
The public is asked to help identify persons of interest in a property case on Feb. 10, according to the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department.
According to a police spokesman, at 8:51 on Feb. 10, officers responded to a call about a card scanning device located on a bank’s ATM card reader.
Cameras at the ATM showed a scanning device being put over the card reader, according to police.
The incident is under investigation by the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department’s property crimes unit, which is encouraging anyone with information to call the TIPS hotline at 816-474-TIPS.
Police are asking the public to help identify two individuals at an ATM machine on Feb. 10. Police are asking the public to help identify two individuals at an ATM machine on Feb. 10. Police are asking the public to help identify individuals at an ATM machine. Police are asking the public to help identify individuals at an ATM machine.
A new book details the experiences of a Kansas doctor in World War I.
by Mary Rupert
The story of a Kansas City, Kansas, doctor in World War I is featured in a new book, “Colonel Wilkinson’s Diary, A Kansas Doctor in World War I France.”
The book about Dr. Hugh Wilkinson is especially timely now, during the centennial of the end of World War I, according to author Joe H. Vaughan.
The book is based on the diary of Dr. Wilkinson, Vaughan said, and it contains his descriptive and sometimes blunt assessments of the war and the people he worked with. Vaughan is Wilkinson’s grandson, and was born about 20 years after the doctor’s death.
Dr. Wilkinson, in his 40s at the time, left Kansas and his family to volunteer for the war effort, and he cared for some of the soldiers most in need at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, according to Vaughan. Later, he was sent to France to command a mobile hospital. He was in France during the flu epidemic of 1918 and a typhoid outbreak.
Dr. Wilkinson, in his diary, described the way medicine was practiced in the days before there was penicillin or air conditioning. He also described the great amount of anguish and loss he observed in the war, known then as the “Great War” and the “War to End All Wars.”
A native of Seneca, Kansas, Dr. Wilkinson returned to Kansas City, Kansas, in 1920, after the war, to practice medicine, with offices in the old Brotherhood Building in the 700 block of Minnesota Avenue, Vaughan said. Wilkinson died in 1934.
Vaughan, a Prairie Village resident who grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, attended Wyandotte High School and the University of Kansas School of Journalism, came across Dr. Wilkinson’s diary one day in an unexpected way.
Vaughan said he started cleaning out his mother’s house after her death in 2006, and found a metal U.S. Army trunk in a storage room. It turned out to be his grandfather’s trunk, and inside was his grandfather’s diary, he said. Vaughan thought it was worth preserving in a book.
“He was either brilliant or an idiot to keep a diary like that,” Vaughan said. It was brilliant because it described World War I in first-person, blunt language, from a doctor’s perspective. At the same time, if Wilkinson had been caught with a diary at the time, he might have been court-martialed, Vaughan added.
Vaughan said some other interesting items he discovered in his grandfather’s trunk were pictures from a stop in the United Kingdom, as well as letters from King George and Gen. John J. Pershing.
Joe Vaughan
In 2012, Vaughan was the author of “Kansas City, Kansas,” a historical book in the Images of America series from Arcadia Publishing. Vaughan also is known here for his background in broadcast journalism.
“Col. Wilkinson’s Diary” is published by Mennonite Press and is available at Varsity Sports, 7717 Parallel Parkway, Kansas City, Kansas, and at the Wyandotte County Museum, 631 N. 126th St., Bonner Springs, Kansas. The book also is available at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, and at amazon.com.
Editor’s note: Alvin Sykes, a human rights activist in Kansas City, Kansas, recently sent this letter to the Wyandotte Daily concerning a bill that would reimburse wrongfully convicted individuals for the years they spent in prison. Sykes and Sen. David Haley, D-4th Dist., have been working on a bill on this topic for 10 years. Sykes spoke at a legislative hearing on a bill on this topic earlier this week.
To Kansas State Sen. David Haley and to whom else it may concern:
As both a veteran certified human rights worker, with over 40 years experience in the victim advocacy field nationwide, and as a citizen of the state of Kansas, I am writing this letter in vigorous support of SB 336 and HB 2579 (Compensation for the Wrongly Convicted).
I firmly believe it is fundamentally unfair and just plain wrong for the state of Kansas to wrongly convict innocent people, such as Lamonte McIntyre, Floyd Bledsoe and Richard Jones (successfully represented by the Innocence Project) and then put them out on the street after years of incarceration without any financial support or compensation to restart their life!
Furthermore it is a slap-in-the-face irony that they would have received more resources and support from the state of Kansas if they had been guilty!
Even though $80,000 compensation for each year served wrongly in prison is not enough for the injustice inflicted against them, it does represent a good start!
Two years ago the state of Kansas passed a law to significantly change the eyewitness identification procedures for crime investigation by law enforcement to radically reduce the occurrence of wrongful convictions in the future. Now it is past time to justly compensate those who have been wrongly convicted in the past and future!
Therefore I strongly urge passage of this legislation, with all deliberate speed, so that the day will come sooner, rather than later, when all people will come before a bar of justice where truth rules, justice prevails and the community has credible confidence in the courts verdicts of guilt or Innocence for all!
Alvin Sykes
Kansas City, Kansas
