Good evening, everyone.
Thanks for joining us.
As we come to the end of 2022,
you might be thinking, man,
it's been another tough year.
So tonight, let's take some time.
We want to highlight some of
the more uplifting stories
we've covered in our community.
So first we'll go to Cottonwood
in western Minnesota for
a story about neighbors.
Helping neighbors Kent Erdahl shows
us how two men rescued each other
just when they both needed it most.
When you live
on a farm, long roads can
both isolate and connect
now. But Brad
website says like anything else out
here, the connection takes work.
It's like you just do it.
You just go over and help somebody,
go over and help them in need.
And that's what we all do.
Brad found himself in need during
evening chores last November.
So I was trying to put the round
Bale in this feeder and the
tractor I got out of the tractor
to make some adjustments and
meanwhile the tractor rolled ahead.
And pinch my leg in there.
He'd left his cell phone inside
and couldn't get his dog Zoe
to leave his side.
I tried to pull the old lass,
he go get me help trick,
but that didn't work.
So after five hours trying to
waive it traffic and free himself,
he put his faith in Plan B.
Plan B was just too. Just to save
my energy to get through the night.
And wait for somebody to find me.
14 hours later, after countless cars
passed by, his neighbors turned in.
The little guy here. He needed to go
for a ride like he does every morning.
Charlie Olsen immediately noticed Brad's
cattle were out, along with his tractor.
He never leaves his tractor out.
I could look right through the feeder
at an angle through the slots,
and I could see him waving,
and when I saw him waving like that,
I knew he was in trouble.
Minutes later, Brad knew
help was finally on the way.
But I'll never forget who it was
who the first Phase I seen. Yeah,
I'm just so glad that he's alive. This
could have had a whole different outcome.
Charlie doesn't need to travel
far to be reminded of that.
14 years ago, we had a rough time.
We lost. The daughter,
Emily Olson died just half a mile
up the road on February 19th,
2008 after a minivan speed through a stop
sign and toppled a Lakeview school bus.
Emily was among four children killed.
Many more, including two of Charlie's sons,
were injured, leaving him in need
when we were on to Sioux
Falls for more surgeries.
When our sons that had gotten banged up,
Brad called me and said,
we've got your livestock,
you take care of your family
for years, he says. That simple act,
along with all the others that
follow down the road from neighbors,
almost felt isolating.
Your first instinct is you
got to pay everybody back,
and the more you think about it,
the more overwhelmed you get that I'll
never be able to pay everybody back.
It's the same feeling Brad is now
trying to navigate after the community
lined his Rd home from the hospital
and more than 1000 people showed
up to a fundraiser to help him get
started on his long road ahead.
It's kind of a different procedure they did.
A lot of them, you'll hear him say above
knee removal or below knee removal,
and they actually took my knee apart.
I still have my kneecap.
I can still flex at the knee joint.
And as he now works to get back
on his feet, it's not the only
work he's putting in.
I hand wrote many a thank yous filling me
for the cards and letters in the support.
Who knows where we'd be sitting today,
but As for the man sitting next
to him, no thank yous are needed.
They're that that took care of it,
right? Yeah, it's. We don't.
We don't want to get too mushy here.
Yeah. All square
and more connected than ever.
Goes around, comes around and
unfortunately or fortunately sometimes
near Cottonwood, MN,
the good Lord is here looking over
us and he was there that night.
Kent Erdahl Care Levin news.
Both Brad and Charlie are former
volunteer firefighters, and credit the
fire department and EMS for performing
the complicated rescue that morning.
From neighbor helping neighbor
to a story about community,
we brought you the story of
The Breakfast Club in 2019.
It's a Bible study for high school
students in Saint Michael, Albertville,
and for years Christy and Jake Vanda
hosted the club out of their home.
But The Breakfast Club kept getting bigger,
so they set off looking for land and
building a new big space just for teenagers.
And Julie Nelson shows us what happened next.
The sun is barely up over Saint
Michael Albertville High School
and hundreds of kids are gathered in the
high school parking lot waiting for this.
Go, go, go. The signal that breakfast
Club can begin about
1/3 of the school makes this mad dash
every other Thursday morning at 6:45 AM.
Yeah, racing to get in line for hash Browns,
good morning and Donuts,
tea and hugs served up by 54
volunteers before finding their seats.
Alright, so let's pray and settling in to
hear a message from Pastor Jake Vanada.
Why am I here? To reflect. God,
some would say, only a miracle
could get nearly 600 teenagers
out of bed before school.
Breakfast Club founders Jake and
Christy Venada would not disagree,
because you can't get teenagers
to do anything you can't.
They started this club out of their house
in 2014 with their two high school aged
kids and a handful of their friends.
Their kids graduated, but breakfast Club
kept growing to about 2 or 300 kids
back when we first visited in 2019.
I want to share with you a story.
So grab God's word.
By the end of that year,
it was obvious the club had
outgrown the clubhouse.
Like, the Lord just gave this,
you should do breakfast Club in a bar.
And so we thought it was an existing barn.
And we tried that, and it didn't work.
So they started looking for land.
Somebody said, you gotta call
this guy Mr Montgomery. And am I?
I don't know, Mr Montgomery.
So I pick a cold call.
We talked for a few minutes
and hung up. Sent me a link
to a care 11 story. You know,
it kind of really hit home as a Christian.
That I need to get involved in this.
Well, he calls me back the next day
and he says I own all the land across
from the high school. I said you do.
And he said whatever you need.
And after that other donations
just started pouring in.
These business owners donated the plumbing,
the electrical and the site work.
How much did you
charge Breakfast Club
for your services? Nothing. Nothing. Zero.
Yeah, in the year of contagious,
I would say this barn is built
with contagious generosity.
People throughout Saint Michael
saw what breakfast Club meant
to kids in their community,
and they wanted to be a part
of it. We can't
do what you do, Jake, up in front.
But we got bulldozers,
we got electrical cords,
we got ceiling fans,
we got light bulbs.
What do you need? Page 1070
in under a year.
This 6300 square foot barn worth 2.1.
Billion dollars was built without
ever organizing a fundraising
campaign or taking on $1.00 of debt
so kids can hear about the Lord and hear
their loved and hear that they matter. And.
I don't know of a teenager on planet Earth
that doesn't need to hear that message.
When the barn first opened, the
Vinedos worried it would be too big,
but we were full. The second time we met,
we opened it and
they filled it. Just like that.
And I'm glad you're here,
because it would look really
bad if we built a big barn.
And then there's like 2 kids.
And by this last breakfast club of the year,
it appears the barn isn't big enough.
What are we gonna do? We don't know. Clay.
Do we need another 100 acres?
I don't know. I I don't even know.
But we didn't know what we were
going to do when we had 12 kids.
It was just Createspace
and trust God.
Get really close together.
God will show us.
He will fund it, he will do it.
He's on the hook for that.
We're on the hook to just be faith.
So stay tuned. And I don't think
God's done with this story.
This breakfast club is only for Saint
Michael Albertville High School students,
but there are now breakfast clubs
all over the metro and as far away as
the state of Texas, North Carolina,
Colorado and Pennsylvania.
We're still ahead on the show tonight,
a story that proves the Twin Cities
has a big and generous heart,
supporting a popular radio personality
who went through a tough time many
of you are all too familiar with.
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Land of 10,000 stories.
The complete collection.
Rewatch your favorite stories or
use the interactive map to find
new stories across our state,
go to care11.com/land.
Welcome back over the summer,
KS 95's longtime radio host CHRISCO opened
up about a really hard time in his life.
His listeners reached out and made what
he said could have been one of his
worst weeks ever a little bit better.
Eva shares the story.
So there's that one.
And then there's that one.
We wore matching shirts.
This black lab.
There's one over kisses,
is the love of Christo's life.
Just her face, those eyes. I mean,
there there is no more adorable,
loving face than that face.
And as a host at KS 95 Radio,
it is Chris Codes.
And Ryan Chrisco professes
his love to babe regularly.
She's just so darn cute
looking at it right now.
And she's in a cute little scarf.
She just had a bath.
In fact, Crisco says this rescue dog.
Rescued him too.
I was saved by babe. She got me
through some really dark times
after after my dad passed away.
But on Monday,
something's wrong with
babes. Something's off.
Babe passed away. I had to put baby
down. Yeah, so we're sending
the big guy some love today.
Chris goes Co hosts showed that
love by organizing bucks for Babe,
a fundraiser for the labs legacy
with money going to the rescue
agency second hand hounds.
They announced it on air Wednesday.
My office manager texted me within
like 8 minutes and she was like,
we're already at $4000. And
I was like in eight minutes.
Congratulations listeners, you did it.
4000 turned to 10 Turn 2,
our $25,000 goal,
which was doubled by Spire Credit
Union and donations kept coming.
And a short two days after
the fundraiser began,
a grand total of 94,000. Four
$94,000 to be exact.
94.5 thousand from the listeners of
94.5 FM 94,000. Money that
will rescue thousands of lives.
Thousand second hand hounds got a lot
of love and they sent some right back.
You starve it, babe is still
the love of christo's life.
I'll never stop missing her.
I'll never stop loving her,
but now that love is shared
with so many. Others, she's
gonna be forever remembered.
While we're talking about
people lifting up our community,
we want to say thank you to you,
the folks who watch this show,
for lifting up our community.
Last month we told you about every meal.
It's a nonprofit that gives
meals to kids in schools in need,
in Minnesota when they need it.
And in two days, you raised
$41,869. That's a weekend of food
for nearly 6900 of our kids.
So again, we want to say thanks.
Coming up from tragedy comes messages
of hope and kindness for anyone
who might need them. See how next.
What is near me? If you're
out at UC news near you, just
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Then tap share with us,
upload your photo or video
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Hit submit and once you see success,
your news has reached our
team at Carol Levin News.
Welcome back. This is a story
about the light that comes on
the other side of the dark,
and that light is in Anoka tonight.
They came here that day and I cried.
In the summer of 2019, Missy Mershman
needed to find a way to make light.
Wonderful now in the dark for the
family of private Nicole Burnham.
I just can't imagine the what their family
goes through and it's really important
for them that Nicole isn't forgotten.
And I don't want it to be either.
Nicole was a graduate of Anoka High
School and an army private from 2015
until her death by suicide in 2018.
She died just four months after telling
her army superior she was sexually
assaulted by a soldier in her barracks,
a soldier the army didn't remove from
being in Nicole's daily contact after
the assault for more than 80 days,
she was outgoing and funny.
Beautiful. She was just a, you know,
shining star and and so it's hard
to understand why she's not here.
And I don't want her to be forgotten.
Missy memorialized Nicole with
the Anoka kindness Rock garden,
a small spot under a tree
at the Veterans Memorial,
a place of peace and a place where
folks could stop to take a peace.
A rock painted with a message of kindness.
I know Nicole's.
Family really felt kindness
was important, and Nicole's
message was to be good to
people and kind to people,
and I just wanted that to live on.
In the three years it's been around,
the garden outgrew its home under that tree.
Just too many people needed a
rock or wanted to make a rock,
and so it moved to its new location,
which is where Tammy found
herself over the years as well.
I kept wanting to come back to
that garden, just seemed like a
peaceful place to just sit and be
and something I wanted to be close to
Tammy. Saw the rocks back at the old tree
and came back again and again. And then
then we ended up having a a crisis in
our family and one of my kiddos was in
a real mental health crisis and we ended
up taking my child to the hospital.
And when I left my child at
the hospital to drive away,
it was one of the hardest moments of my life.
Um, but I had rocks with me that
had some powerful words on them
that I wanted to leave behind.
After she left them that night,
she came back and began painting
rocks for others who might
need them when their day came
to just get the tiniest boost.
Which to me means,
you know what, Tammy? I don't think
this is really a story about rock.
I think it's about something else.
Yeah, it does go deeper.
It does go people want to
connect with other people,
and people that are hurting need
to connect with other people.
And that's what we need to do.
God bless you.
Why would have mattered to help a stranger?
It makes a stronger community and
I think we can all do our part.
You know, everyone can do something.
And this is a small way that
we found to come together.
And do something that makes us feel
good and hopefully can make other
people feel good and find some joy.
Coming up, a wish? Granted,
not just for the kid who made it,
but for his whole school as well.
You won't want to miss it. Be right back.
Be warned before the storm,
the Carol Levin weather warned.
Day signals a change coming for your
weather because winter is challenging.
The weather warning symbol lets
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Be warned before the storm with care
11 weather warned.
So earlier this year, a Bloomington
boy made a wish during his
battle with leukemia.
Wish not just for him,
but for his friends and classmates as well.
And Eva was there as his wish was granted
just in time for his 6th birthday.
For many make a wish children,
their wish is a one time
trip to somewhere special.
But for grant,
his gift is a permanent fixture
in the community to be shared
with children for years to come.
The best ever birthday bash begins
with a little disorientation.
And plenty of party guests ready to
welcome the guest of honor and we
want to say welcome to your wish.
Grant Lovin' S birthday Wish was
a towering new playground in his
favorite color green and Tuesday among
cheers from the community grants,
which was granted.
Why did you climb up in there? Grants
Journey has been tougher than most
a tricky trek with lots of turns.
You go down the slide.
But today it's all downhill.
Because this six year old is cancer free,
we will never forget the day
that Grant was diagnosed.
And through it all,
you've come through and you're stronger.
Grant was diagnosed with leukemia in 2018
and endured more than two years of chemo.
When make a wish approached Grant's family,
he chose to give back to
Bloomington living Hope Lutheran
School for a new playground,
which he helped design
for a little
boy to have the way with all
to think about his school.
This community, it says a lot about who he is
and make a wish, CEO Carrie Davis says.
Just as special is how much the
community chipped in to fulfill the wish.
So we raised just short of $200,000.
Angela Dingell spearheaded the
fundraising and volunteer coordination
and says another 200,000 worth
of skilled labor was donated.
We know that in all things,
God works for the good of those who love him.
Because he's been relatively
isolated during treatment,
he hasn't made a whole lot of friends.
And so this opportunity for him to
go to kindergarten now in the fall,
meet all these friends,
and then just, you know,
every recess he's going to be
playing here with all of his friends.
All because this spunky 6 year
old learned one of life's
big lessons really early.
The best gift of all is giving
back ohh and playing with others.
That's right up there, too.
Eva Anderson, Carol Levin news.
Thanks for joining us tonight for this
special edition of breaking the news.
We hope you enjoyed the
stories we shared with you.
Take care and good night.