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Two juveniles are in custody after allegedly vandalizing a church in Meade County.
The Meade County Sheriff’s Office says on April 9 deputies responded to the Saint Theresa of Avila Catholic Church in Rhodelia in regards to a vandalism complaint.
“The deputies met with some of the church staff who were able to provide some videos of two juveniles on the property vandalizing the exterior of the buildings,” said Meade County Sheriff Phillip Wimpee.
Deputies entered the building and discovered more than $10,000 in damages.
“It appeared that the juveniles had dispersed several fire extinguishers inside the church and destroyed numerous religious artifacts, and some of these religious artifacts are irreplaceable because of the church being so old,” Wimpee said. “The juveniles spread holy oil all over the floor of the building, destroying the carpet, and turned one of the crosses upside down on the altar.”
Deputies processed the scene and collected evidence at the church and in the church’s cemetery where headstones were found to have been damaged.
“The detectives were able to identify two juvenile suspects who were in custody at this time,” Wimpee said. “The suspects are being charged with Burglary in the second degree and Criminal Mischief in the first degree.”
The investigation has been turned over to the Meade County Attorney’s Office and the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office for prosecution.
Baptist Health Hardin CEO Rob Ramey says the recent 2,000-square-foot expansion of the Ring Road Diagnostic Imaging center is part of a $4 million effort to provide area patients with better options.
“We’ve now got four imaging centers where we have 3D mammography available for everybody,” Ramey said. “We’ve upgraded and we’re continuing to upgrade our MRIs and our CTs around the entire market. We’re adding additional x-ray capabilities. We’ve added at the hospital ion robotic imaging, bronchoscopy imaging.”
Baptist Health Hardin hosted an open house at the center on Friday. The open house was an opportunity to highlight some of the additional features the expansion made possible including a women’s center to provide more privacy, a new MRI machine that decreases time and increases patient comfort, and an additional CT scanner that will allow the center to process more than 5,000 additional CT scans a year.
“We know that we need that capacity for our community, for the growth we’re seeing, and with this new machine the images are better, the processing is faster, so it really hopefully will help streamline the processes for our patients and give them an even better experience as well,” Ramey said.
Ramey says the expansion will enhance a diagnostics team that is already a well-regarded one.
“We also understand that you all have a choice, that our community has a choice in where they go for care, and just the other day we were over here and we were celebrating with our staff because they were recognized as being in the top 8 percent nationally of all the diagnostic centers around the entire country,” Ramey said.
The Baptist Health Hardin Diagnostic Imaging center is open Mondays through Fridays.
A tip to law enforcement resulted in two arrests in Grayson County.
According to the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office, a citizen called the sheriff’s office on April 9 to report a “wanted person” removing items from a storage building next to a business on west U.S. 62 in Leitchfield. Grayson County Sheriff Norman Chaffins responded to the scene and saw a male subject walk out of the storage building and to a running vehicle. After being asked to identify himself, the man said his name was Shane Melton, and he produced an Indiana ID card.
Additional units arrived on scene and three more suspects exited the building. Melton was found to have active warrants out of Grayson, Hart, and LaRue counties along with an extradition warrant out of Indiana. He was also found to be in possession of a handgun and methamphetamine.
Melton was taken into custody. One of the suspects that exited the building was identified as William Sandlin of Leitchfield, for whom a warrant for Leaving the Scene of an Accident and other charges was issued a few days prior after Sandlin fled the scene of an accident on Claggett Road. Sandlin was also taken into custody, with both suspects lodged in the Grayson County Detention Center.