WULF News

The Elizabethtown Police Department is inviting area families to an awareness event Wednesday.

“In acknowledgement of April being Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Awareness Month, we are hosting a Chalk the Walk event at the police department this coming Wednesday between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. in an effort to raise awareness and put a stop to these heinous crimes,” said EPD Public Information Officer Chris Denham. “Citizens will be provided with sidewalk chalk as well as a space to draw murals or slogans that show their support for victims. Juanitos Tacos will be on site and dinner will be provided free of charge to all participants. In the event of inclement weather, we will move the event into the lobby of the police department and the art will be drawn on large poster boards.”

The EPD says that statistics show that nearly 2 in 5 women and 1 in 5 men will experience contact with sexual violence in their lifetime, and Kentucky is ranked sixth in the country for child victims of maltreatment at a rate of 14.7 per 1,000 children, nearly double the national rate.

More information on the event can be found on the Elizabethtown Police Department Facebook page.

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.

The Hodgenville Police Department is teaming up with community partners for a sexual assault awareness event Monday evening.

Hodgenville Police Chief James Richardson says tonight’s event expands on the “sextortion” presentation the department gave to the public in late March.

“We’re going to give a presentation,” Richardson said. “It’s going to start at 6 p.m. at the Extension Office here in Larue County up on Old Elizabethtown Road, and what we will do is we’ll start out with basically what are the issues that we’re seeing here in our community and then we will talk about how HPD investigates those.”

Richardson said the event ties into April being Child Abuse Awareness Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The ultimate goal of the event is to share information and connect people with resources.

“If anybody wants to come, we encourage in-person, that way you can actually meet and see everybody,” Richardson said. “You’ll get to see some of the sexual assault investigators from the police department. You’ll get to ask questions. Any questions that we have from the community, they can email me questions. They can go on our Facebook page and message me questions that they want answered, and we’ll try to address those there in the presentation.”

The event will be recorded for anybody unable to attend in person.

Kentucky Farm Bureau is launching a new initiative aimed at helping maintain ag production on Kentucky farms.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in their 2022 Census of Agriculture that Kentucky has lost 17,000 farms and 1.4 million acres of farmland over the last 20 years. In order to help farm families keep their farms in active production, Kentucky Farm Bureau has launched the Kentucky Farmland Transition Initiative.

KFB says the main goal of the initiative is to preserve family farm ownership and to help families navigate the farm transition process. The initiative has three main objectives:

-increase public education about farmland transition

-gather and provide technical help and local resources for families

-pursue state and federal policy development that will help keep production agriculture at the forefront of farmland transition and reduce burdens in the process

KFB plans to expand the initiative over the coming months. For more information, visit www.kyfarmlandtransition.com.

A Virgina man faces multiple charges after his arrest in Grayson County Wednesday.

The Leitchfield Police Department says officers responded to Hometown Hangout in the early morning hours of April 10 for a report of a possible burglary.

“Upon arrival, officers found that a back door had been left unlocked and multiple fridges and the walk-in cooler had been entered by someone,” said Detective Sergeant Ian Renfrow with the LPD. “Multiple cases of beer were opened and some products were found to be missing from the business.”

Officers reviewed surveillance footage, which showed a male subject enter the business through the unlocked door. He is then seen forcing open a walk-in cooler inside of the business.

“Officers then received information and responded to an apartment on Penner Drive and attempted to make contact with a suspect who had been named as Mr. Ruben Hernandez,” Renfrow said.

The resident of the apartment Hernandez was located at was outside speaking with police officers, and told the officers she left the door unlocked. Officers found the door had been locked.

“She then gave them permission to force entry into the apartment,” Renfrow said. “Once they got into the apartment, Hernandez would not comply with officer orders. He then resisted with them for just a brief moment, and they were able to get him into handcuffs and get him into custody at that point.”

Hernandez was lodged in the Grayson County Detention Center. He faces multiple charges including Burglary, Theft by Unlawful Taking, Criminal Mischief, and Resisting Arrest. Officers stated that Hernandez made multiple statements that “once he was out (of jail), we would never see him again.”