The U-S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa said Friday, that on November 13th, 2015, 49-year old Stephen Thomas, of Los Angeles, California, was sentenced by Chief District Judge John A. Jarvey to 80 months in prison for his role in leading a sophisticated counterfeit credit and debit card scheme in Iowa. Thomas was also ordered to pay restitution, to serve 3 years of supervised release following the period of imprisonment, and to pay a $300 special assessment to the Crime Victims Fund. Thomas previously pleaded guilty to the charges of conspiracy, access device fraud, and false statements to a federal official.

The investigation of this matter began as a result of a suspicious package that was delivered to a hotel in Des Moines. Law enforcement determined that the package contained counterfeit debit and credit cards that had been mailed from California to Thomas and others. Thomas and three co-defendants—50-year old Ronald Barre, Jr., 39-year old Nakika Carter, and 58-year old Richard Foust—left California together to execute the scheme across the Midwest.

The group used counterfeit debit and credit cards to withdraw money from casinos in Minnesota and Iowa, and to purchase items at retailers. The counterfeit cards contained legitimate debit and credit card information encoded onto the strips of the back of the cards, but were embossed with the names of the defendants.Thomas traveled with a California driver’s license in another person’s name, and provided a false name, date of birth, and social security number to law enforcement. At the time of his arrest, Thomas had an active arrest warrant for having escaped from federal custody.

Thomas’s co-defendants were previously sentenced for their roles in the scheme. Foust received 24 months imprisonment; Carter received 20 months’ imprisonment; and Barre received 32 months’ imprisonment. All co-defendants are jointly and severally liable for restitution.

The investigation was conducted by the United States Postal Inspection Service, the United States Secret Service, the Des Moines Police Department, the Bloomington, Minnesota, Police Department, and the Iowa Department of Public Safety Division of Criminal Investigation. The case was prosecuted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa.

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (AP) — Iowa prison officials say a 30-year-old inmate who didn’t return from his job has been listed as escaped from the state’s Council Bluffs work release facility. Authorities say Matthew Ashby didn’t return to the facility on Friday. He was transferred there on Sept. 15th.

Since June 2010, Ashby has been serving a 20-year sentence out of Cass County for willful injury and child endangerment with serious injury.

Police, prosecutors,and medical professionals gathered in Iowa City this week for a summit on the growing problem of heroin addiction in Iowa. They heard how overuse of prescription painkillers leads addicts to turn to heroin — which is cheaper and easier to get — and how heroin use now rivals the methamphetamine epidemic. Doctor Anthony Miller with Veterans Hospital in Iowa City says the heroin problem has its roots in the 1990’s when views on managing pain shifted in American medicine. He says providers began to think that under-treating pain was wrong, and that pain killers known as Opioids are safe.

“And between the years of 1997 and 2007 the amount of Opioids prescribed in the United States quadrupled,” Millers says. Their use in Iowa tripled and the addiction to Opioids soared. Now addicts who started on pain pills are injecting heroin to satisfy the craving. Heroin deaths which we used to be associated with a sordid ghetto life are happening to the boy and girl next door. Andy Brown of Davenport was prescribed Percocet for pain after surgery when he was 14. He died of heroin overdose at the age of 33. His mother, Kim Brown showed pictures of her son during the summit and says he overdosed three times in all.

“The third time he overdosed he died,” Brown says. ” The person he was with didn’t call for help.” Brown now advocates for easier access to a medicine that works as an antidote for an overdose that would otherwise be deadly. That’s one of several strategies experts examined to minimize the damage from heroin use, while law enforcement struggles to keep it off the streets. Federal Drug Enforcement Agent Matt Bradford says big heroin busts are going down in Chicago and that is a key here.

“Chicago is your main source city that supplies Iowa. So, Chicago is important,” according to Bradford. He says the drug comes primarily from a cartel in Mexico. Now officials have launched the Eastern Iowa Heroin Initiative to address prevention, treatment and enforcement in Linn, Johnson, Blackhawk and Dubuque Counties. Jerrry Blomgren with the Johnson County Narcotics Task Force attended the summit with several of his undercover cops.

“A lot of them do undercover buys of drugs. Heroin has been a big problem for all of us,” Blomgren says. A spokesman for the Iowa Department of Public Health says there are more methodone clinics to treat the addicted in eastern Iowa because of the heroin problem there. He says there are clinics in Council Bluffs and Sioux City in western Iowa and that doesn’t leave a lot of options when patients there are coming for daily dosing.

While heroin has grabbed the attention of Iowans the relatively older problem of painkiller addiction persists. Experts say student athletes should be educated about pain meds. They say employers should be aware of the potential for their employees to be over-prescribed pain meds following workplace injuries. Keynote speaker Sam Quinones, author of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” says pharmaceutical companies should be paying for the unused drug collection efforts underway in some Iowa towns. He says heroin use has exploded because it hasn’t been acknowledged like meth. “People have been mortified to talk about their kid — who died in a McDonald’s bathroom with a needle in his arm,” Quinones says.

Kim Brown knows that frustration firsthand. “Because when my son died in 2011, I didn’t have anywhere to go….nobody would talk to me,” Brown explains. Brown now heads up a group for parents who’ve lost children to drug overdose. She’ll be back will at the capitol next year pushing for a law to let families have the antidote that stops a heroin overdose. She says that might have saved her son’s life.

Health officials say for the 13-year period beginning in 2000, Iowans dying from prescription medication overdoses increased twenty-fold. Heroin overdose deaths experienced the same alarming rate of increase, jumping from one to 20 deaths per year.

(Radio Iowa)

An on-line financial company has released a study evaluating which counties in the country have the lowest per capita personal debt — and a couple of Iowa counties are cited. SmartAsset ranks the residents of Wright County, Iowa, as having the fourth smallest personal debt load of a county in the country. According to the analysis, residents in the Wright County area spend, on average, about 41 percent of their income on a mortgage, another eight percent on credit card debt and seven-and-a-half percent of their income on a vehicle loan.

Clay County ranks second in the state — and 14th nationally — for lowest per capita personal debt load. O’Brien, Des Moines, Allamakee, Buena Vista, Henry, Kossuth, Jackson and Floyd Counties were all ranked in the top 10 — in Iowa — for low personal debt.

In the immediate KJAN listening area:

• Cass County ranks 24th lowest in the State for personal debt load. Residents spend, on average 7.9% of their income on credit card debt, 12.1% on a vehicle loan, and 80.2% on a mortgage. The average income per capita is $25,448.
• In Guthrie County, which ranked 27th, residents spend about 9.5% of their income for credit card debt, 11.6% for vehicle loans, and 66% for a mortgage.
• And in Pottawattamie County, which ranks 54th, and where the per capita income is $25,847, residents spend 9.1% of that for credit card debt, 12.9% for vehicle loans, and 94.3% of their income for a mortgage.

SmartAsset didn’t have enough data to list for Audubon, Adair, Adams, Montgomery and Shelby Counties. Information is available for Harrison, Mills and Page Counties in southwest Iowa. See the link under this same story on the News page at kjan.com, for information about other Iowa counties.

Go to https://smartasset.com/personal-loans/personal-loan-rates#iowa to see the SmartAsset analysis and data for many other Iowa counties.

(Radio Iowa/KJAN)