A man who pleaded guilty to threats of violence outside a St. Paul school, causing it to go into lockdown, was sentenced this week to three years of supervised probation.

Marcelo Rubio Loredo, 41, was accused of being outside Hmong College Prep Academy with a machete that he used to threaten staff members. He tried to get into the charter school at 1515 Brewster St., just east of Snelling Avenue, through a locked door in May 2024, according to a criminal complaint.

Loredo pleaded guilty to one count of felony threats of violence in reckless disregard of the risk and another count of the same charge was dismissed. The complaint said he raised the machete over his shoulder in a swinging manner, which a staff member took as a threat.

He told an investigator that he had left his job and was looking for something to eat. He said he had the machete because he was working on a yard, the charges say.

Ramsey County District Court Judge Sophia Vuelo sentenced Loredo on Tuesday to 91 days in custody, which he’s already served.

State sentencing guidelines recommended a one-year stayed sentence, according to the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office.

Loredo received a stay of imposition, which means the sentence will be reduced to a misdemeanor if he successfully completes probation and the sentence is not imposed due to a probation violation, the county attorney’s office said.

— Mara H. Gottfried

Wildfires bring state disaster assistance

State disaster assistance will help rebuild public infrastructure damaged in wildfires that burned in St. Louis County in May.

In a news release this week, Gov. Tim Walz said he authorized the emergency assistance and that the total amount of funding will be determined when damage assessments are complete.

“The fires that spread across Northern Minnesota earlier this year caused severe damage and major loss,” Walz said in the news release. “I’m grateful for Minnesota’s emergency management team as they work closely with St. Louis County to assess the damage and help communities recover.”

Josh Brinkman, emergency management coordinator for the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, explained that the state offers a 75% reimbursement for public safety costs and to rebuild roadways, bridges and power cooperative infrastructure.

But it doesn’t offer much help to the owners of more than 140 structures and over 30 year-round homes that burned in the Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires.

“At a state-declared disaster, what we really don’t get a whole lot of is what we would term ‘individual assistance,’ and that would be individual assistance direct to the homeowner,” Brinkman said.

Federal assistance would offer that; however, both the county and state need to reach certain monetary thresholds to unlock federal funds, and those were not met, Brinkman said. That’s because so many of the fires burned on federal land, and federal incident management teams were brought in to lead the response. Federal funds spent on the ground to battle the blaze can’t be put toward that threshold.

“We can’t match the federal dollars with federal dollars … Because so many federal dollars were spent on the response side, it kind of hurt us a little bit, or hampers the ability to get federal dollars for the recovery side,” Brinkman said.

— Forum News Service

Lighthouse regains its ‘iconic beam’ tonight

It won’t just be fireworks lighting up the night sky in Two Harbors this Fourth of July.

For the first time in six years, the iconic light from the North Shore city’s lighthouse beacon 25 miles northeast of Duluth will once again sweep across Lake Superior.

The lighthouse’s light went dark in November 2019 due to a hardware failure. With help from the U.S. Coast Guard, four volunteer lighthouse keepers with the Lake County Historical Society — which owns the lighthouse— installed a temporary beacon so the facility could continue to operate as a private aid to navigation on the lake.

But it’s a flashing light, “that detracts a little bit from that iconic beacon that you see sweeping across Agate Bay,” said Ellen Lynch, executive director of the historical society.

So the organization began fundraising to purchase a new light. It raised $50,000 and bought an LED beacon from a Finnish company that mimics the rotational sweeping pattern of the original lighthouse.

And now the Lake County Historical Society plans to light the new beacon on Friday, July 4, as part of a celebration marking the 100th anniversary of the organization, just before the Independence Day fireworks show.

— MPR News