Albert Lea Tribune

Skov was behind the wheel with a near-fatal BAL when he drove into a head-on wreck and died.

Bar owner Michael Skov was behind the wheel and more than four times over the legal blood-alcohol limit when he drove into a fatal head-on collision on Minnesota Highway 13 just north of Albert Lea, a State Patrol spokeswoman said today.

On the rainy night on April 14, Skov was driving a 1993 Buick LeSabre northbound just after 10:30 p.m. when he crossed into the southbound lane and crashed into a 2008 Cadillac CTS. The driver and two passengers in the Cadillac were all treated at the hospital and released the next day.

Though the State Patrol had previously announced that Skov, 47, had "acute alcohol intoxication" at the time of the crash, his BAL hadn't been disclosed until today. Skov owned the Bend in the Road bar in Manchester, Minnesota.

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Bob Cardinal needs an internet coach.

Bob Cardinal, Maplewood Councilman and a former mayor, forwarded a comically offensive e-mail to a handful of his softball buddies last Thursday night.

The e-mail's subject line read "Muslim's" and inside was an attachment splashed with topless women, calling on folks to partake in "Walk Naked for America Day" next Saturday. Pretty juvenile, right? Sure, but at the same time we live in a free country and Cardinal is free to forward whatever internet junk he wants to his friends.

Cardinal, however, generated some unwanted attention for himself by accidentally copying a Pioneer Press reporter on the e-mail. Oops!

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truckaccidentlaw.org

This 2010 truck accident spilled bees all over the highway in Lakeville.

​A potato-chip-chomping trucker carrying a load of beehives to California from Minnesota crashed around 10 p.m. last night in Montana, spilling hives all over the highway.

The trucker, an Iowan, told Montana police that while driving he reached down to grab a bag of chips. When he looked up, a deer was standing in the middle of the road. He swerved to miss the deer, crashed into the median, and ended up flipping his rig upside down.

According to the Billings Gazette, police are still determining whether to charge the hungry trucker for careless driving.

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State Patrol

A Target truck experienced its very own race to the bottom this morning.

​Some business observers might argue that Target is sinking, but they surely wouldn't have this in mind.

Around 6 a.m. this morning, a Target semi-trailer driving eastbound on Interstate 94 near Monticello drove off the road onto a pond, then broke through the thin ice and sank.

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For some reason, this guy wants to live another day. What a loser, right?

​Seatbelts are pretty much the only thing that's ever been proven to do any good. These days, not wearing your seatbelt isn't even comparable to smoking cigarettes -- it's more like smoking cigarettes and lighting them each time by leaning your big stupid head into a campfire.

Minneapolis is in sort of a tight spot on the seatbelt issue. The hipster side of us wants to be aloof, and rely on our mustaches and ironic belt-buckle to save us. But we're also fit, and will probably age well. Plus, people, like, totally like us, so we have a lot to live for.

It seems that our practical side is winning out over our devil-may-care attitude: These days, about 94 percent of Minneapolis drivers and passengers are wearing their seatbelts, according to a new study form the Minneapolis Police Department.
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MN State Patrol

This hole is where the deer's head crashed through the windshield.

​The Minnesota State Patrol is trying to warn drivers about highway safety. In order to hammer home their point, they've released a pretty frightening video of a state trooper crashing into a deer.

Or, rather, the other way around: As the video shows, there's pretty much no way the driver could've avoided this buck, which came zooming out of a ditch and threw itself in front of his patrol car.

The State Patrol also released a number of photos, which show a gigantic, deer-shaped dent in the side of the patrol car, and a huge hole in the windshield where the deer's head, antlers and all, came bursting in on the driver.
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Can't we work something out?

​If you're looking to crash into a deer, Minnesota's not a bad place to start.

If you don't want to kill Bambi, destroy your car, and possibly hurt yourself and your passengers in the process... well, now you finally have that one missing reason to avoid the state of West Virginia.

Minnesota is the eighth most likely state to have a deer-vehicle collision, according to a new study from State Farm Insurance.

Going against the grain, Minnesota actually saw an increase of 4 percent over last year's collisions. Nationwide, the total number of deer crashes is down 7 percent. Even with that decrease, there were a whole lot of deer accidents from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011.

Unless you're an expert on this kind of stuff, you might be shocked to find out how many.
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The story of how the boy was shot has changed overnight.

​Police say that a 16-year-old boy and his friend were playing around with a rifle last night when the gun went off unexpectedly, killing the other boy, who was 15 years old. Initial reports had it that the gunshot was self-inflicted but accidental. This morning, the story is changing a bit.

The 15-year-old, whose identity has not been released, was killed by a single gunshot to the neck. The the 16 year old, also unidentified at this point, was taken in for questioning and has since been released to his parents.

The initial version of the story is that the gun had gone off while the younger boy was holding it, but the Star Tribune is now reporting that the boy's death was a tragic case of dangerous fun and games.
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This truck probably needs to go in for repairs.

​Ben Brummer took his eye off the road, and it nearly caused instant death. Instead, he's probably a bit shaken up and has one hell of a story to tell.

Brummer, a 59-year-old semi truck driver from Westbrook, was pulling a full load of corn into an ethanol plant in Heron Lake around 9 a.m. last Thursday morning. As Brummer passed over the railroad tracks -- which are marked with a sign, but not flashing lights -- he didn't notice that a Union Pacific train was barreling down on him.

A very loud, very scary moment later, Brummer's semi truck was cut in two pieces by the train. His corn haul was thrown everywhere, and the truck was destroyed.

Brummer was not only alive but completely unharmed, and, according to Jackson County Sheriff Roger Hawkinson, thanking God that he'd made it out with a pulse. 

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Mahdi Patton: charged with five felonies for breaking Sam Humleker's legs

​Mahdi Jay Patton, the 19-year-old man who blew though a stop sign and slammed into Sam Humleker's car early Tuesday morning in south Minneapolis, has just been charged with five felonies.

While fleeing police at the intersection of East 42nd Street and 13th Avenue South, Patton's grey GMC Yukon hit Humleker's dark green Subaru Forrester with such force that Humleker's car flipped several times. Patton jumped from his Yukon and ran.

Once police caught up with him, he admitted he'd been smoking pot and that he thought he'd killed Humleker. When the cops explained that Humleker had lived, he grew philosophical:

"I gotta deal with the consequences of what I got myself into," Patton said.

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