(AP) — An Omaha man is facing burglary charges after being caught on a rooftop, and police are looking for the man’s accomplice.

The man was arrested Monday morning after someone reported seeing two men on the roof of a building in northeast Omaha around 5:30 a.m.

Police say 35-year old Bryan Grutel had burglary tools on him when he was caught, and several of the building’s air conditioners had been damaged or dismantled.

Several thefts involving air conditioners have been reported in Omaha in recent weeks.

Authorities say a Missouri man died after his minivan rammed a garbage truck in northeast Nebraska.

The Nebraska State Patrol says the accident occurred a little before 10 a.m. Monday on U.S. Highway 20, about a half-mile west of Jackson.

The patrol says the minivan crossed the center line and clipped a semitrailer before striking the garbage truck.

The minivan driver was pronounced dead at the scene. He was identified as 46-year-old Rex Dodd, of Bethel, Mo.

Officials say the garbage truck driver, 41-year-old Troy Lane, of Sioux City, Iowa, was taken to Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City. He’s been released.

The semitrailer driver wasn’t injured.

(AP) — Sgt. 1st Class Greg Robinson has become the first amputee to complete Army air assault school, a course so grueling his prosthetic leg broke down twice over the 10 days spent rappelling down ropes, marching long distances and navigating obstacle courses.

Each year thousands of soldiers are physically and mentally tested at the Fort Campbell , Kentucky school. Instructors said Robinson accomplished all that others did and trainers cut him no slack even though he lost part of his right leg in Afghanistan in 2006.

The 34-year-old noncommissioned officer from Elizabethtown, Ill., graduated Monday.

War wounds from Iraq and Afghanistan and the Boston Marathon bombing have highlighted the challenges to recovery amputees face.

Robinson, a platoon sergeant, says he was determined to complete the same program soldiers under his command must confront.

An Ohio girl is recovering after getting a critical kidney transplant — with the organ donated by her former kindergarten teacher.

Nicole Miller — an 8-year-old first-grader at Mansfield Christian School — got the kidney last week from Wendy Killian, who was her kindergarten teacher last year.

Nicole suffered from a genetic disorder that caused kidney malformation.

Killian became involved during a parent-teacher conference with Nicole’s mother. The teacher asked for the criteria needed to be a donor and found she met them. She says she was inspired to be a donor because her son needed and received a blood platelet transfusion.

The transplant happened last Tuesday at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland.

A man has been rescued from beneath a tractor after an accident in southeast Nebraska.

Firefighters were dispatched around 5 p.m. to an address south of Hickman.

The tractor had been pushing dirt into a ravine when the tractor tipped over, trapping the man.

Hickman Fire Chief Stan Draper says it took about 30 minutes to cut off the tractor steering wheel and dig away some dirt so the man could be freed.

The man was flown to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. His name hasn’t been released.

Peru State College and various officials have asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the mother of a missing student.

The lawsuit by LaTanya Thomas blames the college and officials for neglecting to protect her daughter, 19-year-old Tyler “Ty” Thomas, from what the lawsuit says was a December 2010 attack that killed her. The lawsuit says she should have been protected from fellow student Joshua Keadle, who has been imprisoned since for the 2008 rape of a Fremont teenager.

The dismissal motion says officials couldn’t foresee that placing Keadle in the same dormitory where Thomas lived would lead to an assault by Keadle.

He has not been charged in her disappearance.

Grand Island police have arrested a man they say used a stolen skid loader to rip up and carry off an automatic teller machine.

Police say officers were called to the scene around 5:15 a.m. Friday and found 41-year-old Bryce Malesker in a skid loader, smashing the stand-alone building housing the drive-up ATM. Police chased the skid loader — which has a maximum speed of about 10 mph — through Grand Island streets as it carried off the ATM in its front bucket.

Police say the ATM soon fell onto the roadway, and the skid loader continued through yards and fences before hitting and damaging an elementary school.

Malesker was arrested after the skid loader stalled out on a curb.

Unlike in Texas, groundwater levels in the aquifer beneath Nebraska have generally remained healthy, but officials aren’t sure if that will continue as farmers continue to irrigate.

Experts at the U.S. Geologic Survey agency that study the vast underground bodies of water that stretch beneath eight states say they can’t predict how the aquifer will fare.

Steve Peterson, lead hydrologist for the High Plains Groundwater Availability Study, says the aquifer’s future will depend on regulations and water-management decisions farmers and officials make.

Peterson says in Texas and other Southern Plains states groundwater levels have fallen more than 150 feet compared to the era before irrigation.

Peterson is working on a new report due out this fall that will look at groundwater issues.

(AP)-Authorities have identified the two people killed when a small plane owned by a flight school crashed in northeast Nebraska this weekend.

Federal investigators are expected to reach the crash site about two miles southeast of Norfolk on Sunday afternoon to determine the cause of Saturday’s crash.

Officials say 26-year-old Dale Butler of Omaha and 24-year-old Amy Brobst of Fort Collins, Colo., both died on impact.

The Piper PA-28 plane that crashed was registered to the Pro-Flite Inc. flight training school based in Omaha. Company officials declined to comment on the crash Sunday because they don’t yet know what happened.

FAA officials said the plane struck a power line before crashing into some trees, but the cause of the crash wasn’t immediately clear Sunday.

 

(AP) — A judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by the family of a Nebraska inmate who died in 2010 while in custody.

The lawsuit was dismissed Thursday. Lancaster County District Judge John Colborn found there wasn’t enough evidence to show that state officials had been negligent in the death of 51-year-old Darryl Reed.

Reed died from heart disease and hardening of the arteries. He was serving a 5-to-8 year sentence for a drug conviction when he was taken from an Omaha prison to a prison infirmary in Lincoln because of behavior that led security staff to think he has used illegal drugs. Hours later, a nurse found him in distress, and he was taken to a Lincoln hospital, where he died.