Appleton pub denied license for devices that police say are illegal gambling machines
The same or similar devices, though, are in operation at other businesses in Appleton, Jason Lachance of De Pere told the city's Safety and Licensing Committee.
"I think everybody here has been to a bar, a restaurant, whatever, that has them in there in the city of Appleton," Lachance said. "I know I have."
Appleton requires applicants for a mechanical amusement device license to identify the brand/name and type of device.
Pizzeria Pub & Bar, 1200 N. Sharon St., listed five devices. Only a dartboard passed the police review.
"It's been a relatively recent change where the application has been altered to include requesting enough information to frankly figure out what in the world individual machines are," Assistant City Attorney Zak Buruin said.
Buruin acknowledged that illegal gambling devices are operating in the city, but he said that was an enforcement issue, not the licensing issue before the committee.
On a 5-0 vote, the committee upheld the denial of the license. It will be considered Wednesday by the Common Council.
According to the Wisconsin Department of Administration, video gaming devices are not legal anywhere in the state, except in authorized tribal gaming facilities. "Bars and taverns may offer five or fewer devices for amusement only, meaning they must be free to play or not provide anything of value as a prize," the DOA says.
Pizzeria Pub & Bar sought approval for five devices:
"Dart Board"
"Golden Fortune"
"Fusion 2"
"Fire Link"
"Fusion 2"
"Based on my knowledge and research into gambling machines, all of these listed machines (except the dart board) are illegal in Wisconsin" under state statutes 945.03, 945.035 and 945.04, police Lt. Ben Goodin said in a memorandum to the committee.
Goodin said the devices also are illegal in Appleton under ordinance 9-52(3).
In upholding the denial, the committee indicated that Pizzeria Pub & Bar could reapply for a license for the dartboard, but that would require new $25 application fee. The initial fee of $125 — $25 each for five devices — pays for the city staff review and is not refundable.
Earlier this month, the Common Council voted 13-2 to deny a liquor license for Delaire's coffee and board game bar, 823 W. College Ave., due to concerns the business might install illegal gambling machines.
Before the vote, business owner David Boulanger of West Bend told the council that he agreed in writing that Delaire's wouldn't have any illegal gambling machines.
"If the council wants to include that as a condition on my license, I have no problem with that," Boulanger said. "Yet despite this, I'm still being denied, while I personally identified 15 other businesses within a half mile of this City Hall that currently have gambling machines and are operating without issue."
Council member Chris Croatt said Boulanger's statement was consistent with what Boulanger told the Safety and Licensing Committee "since they changed their business plan."
Boulanger's statement didn't sway council member Katie Van Zeeland.
"The applicant did provide a model business that advertises gambling on their Facebook page, and that, for me, is the biggest reason why I'll vote against this," she said.
Council member Denise Fenton also was unconvinced.
"I have no confidence that the applicant is telling us the truth about his intentions," Fenton said at committee.
Contact Duke Behnke at 920-993-7176 or dbehnke@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DukeBehnke.
This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Appleton pub denied license for devices over illegal gambling concerns
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Read Bryan Kohberger's signed killer confession
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Idaho college killings: Questions remain after stunning guilty plea
Bryan Kohberger has been behind bars for nearly 1,000 days. All the while, his lawyers had repeatedly insisted he was innocent. Now that the criminology student accused of killing four Idaho college students has instead pleaded guilty in a dramatic turn of events, he will almost certainly spend the rest of his days behind bars. The guilty plea and admission to the stabbing deaths -- just weeks from the planned start of his trial -- stunned many, in a case that had ceaselessly gripped headlines. What had been seen as a largely circumstantial case was suddenly crystallizing with every admission that Kohberger made to the judge on Wednesday. But many questions remained unanswered. While Kohberger admitted to the killings of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin -- students at a school mere miles away from his own and with no apparent connection to him -- many of the details remain a mystery, most notably: why he did it. 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Kohberger was taken into custody at his parents' home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, after driving cross-country to spend the holidays with family. He appeared to have no connection to the victims, save for their schools' proximity. And yet, prosecutors alleged, his DNA had been found on the button snap of the knife sheath. His phone pinged off cell towers in the King Road home's area the night the killings occurred, they said. His car was caught on surveillance footage taking multiple passes by what would soon become a crime scene, they said. One of two surviving roommates told police she had seen a masked intruder with "bushy eyebrows" that night – a description that has become a hallmark of the case and one, prosecutors said, applied to Kohberger, though his lawyers would later dispute that. After Kohberger's arrest, the lawyer representing him in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, said his client was "eager to be exonerated of these charges." The case was largely circumstantial. 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It's an alibi that both judges who have overseen the case summarily scoffed at: Judge John Judge in Moscow, dubbing it a "so-called" alibi; Judge Steven Hippler in Boise, saying "at this point, [Kohberger] has not provided an alibi, partial or otherwise." Some of the search warrants served on Kohberger's online shopping indicated curiosities far earthlier than the cosmos, prosecutors said. Eight months before four Idaho college students would be found stabbed to death, as ABC News has previously reported, the man accused of the bloody killing spree bought a knife that matches what prosecutors said could be the murder weapon. Kohberger's lawyers, while arguing his innocence, had said the whole Kohberger family had access to that Amazon account. But it was Kohberger's buy, prosecutors said. "He purchased online a KA-BAR knife and sheath with an Amazon gift card," prosecutor Bill Thompson said at Wednesday's plea hearing. 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Miami Herald
04-07-2025
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‘Disgusted': Bryan Kohberger's former friends, peers react to guilty murder plea
Childhood friends of Bryan Kohberger, who pleaded guilty Wednesday to stabbing four University of Idaho students to death in November 2022, have tracked his murder case from afar and said they felt shocked the former Pennsylvania resident suddenly agreed to a plea deal to spare his life. 'I won't lie, I kind of spiraled yesterday,' Casey Arntz, 32, told the Idaho Statesman in a text Thursday. 'Did he ever have thoughts like that before? Did he ever think that he wanted to kill me or my friends? Were we spared because we were friends with him?' Arntz and her younger brother, Thomas, grew up together with Kohberger in the Pocono Mountains near the Pennsylvania state line with New Jersey among a small circle of friends. They spent time together playing video games after school, as well as getting outdoors in the heavily forested region. As Kohberger got into drugs in high school, they said, a distance developed. Kohberger later overcame a heroin addiction. With the sporadic exception, they hadn't spoken in years, which made his arrest at his parents' Pennsylvania home in December 2022 so startling. He had been their awkward, chubby teenage friend, with heightened ability to observe and wit to match, they said. Now he was accused of killing four students on the other side of the country in a nationally known investigation that unimaginably ended in their hometown. The victims were Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, and Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20. Each suffered multiple wounds in the attack at an off-campus home on King Road in Moscow, Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson told the court Wednesday. The allegations floored them then, and similar emotions rushed back this week after Kohberger, 30, admitted he repeatedly stabbed the four college undergraduates with a large, fixed-blade knife that prosecutors said he bought on Amazon in March 2022 while living in Pennsylvania. Kohberger brought the knife and Ka-Bar brand leather sheath — which he left behind with his DNA at the crime scene — with him on his move a few months later to Pullman for a Ph.D. program at Washington State University. On Wednesday, Kohberger pleaded guilty to the four counts of first-degree murder and a count of felony burglary to avoid a possible death sentence at trial. He agreed to maximum sentences for each, which is likely to see him spend the rest of his life in prison. Kohberger will have no chance of parole and he can never file an appeal, according to the terms of the agreement. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 23. Donna Yozwiak, Kohberger's high school guidance counselor, reacted with surprise. 'Actually, I was hoping that he was not the murderer who killed these four students,' she said in an email to the Statesman. 'I hope that his family will survive this horrendous ordeal and be able to get on with their lives. I also hope that the victims' relatives gain much needed closure and heal after this tragedy. 'As a society, we may never know the motivation for the murders or if Bryan Kohberger has any remorse for his violent actions.' 'Let the inside deal with him' Kohberger's admissions in court finally put any question of his culpability to bed for Jack Baylis, 31, another of their group of friends at the time. 'You wouldn't plead guilty to it unless you did that,' he said in a phone interview Thursday. 'If you were framed, you'd be fighting tooth and nail.' Kohberger's decision to take people's lives was additionally disheartening, he said, because he had kicked his drug habit and seemingly had a life direction. But the desire to learn about people who commit murder — an area of interest for Kohberger — took hold, and he likely wanted to see whether he could get away with the perfect crime, Baylis said. 'I think he did it to see what it felt like, to experience it. If he wanted to write a paper about what killers feel and why they kill, to be accurate, you have to experience it yourself to truly understand it,' Baylis said. 'To get into the mind of a killer, you have to be a killer, would be my guess.' Casey Arntz told the Statesman she had conflicting emotions about how, after 2 ½ years of legal proceedings, her former friend acknowledged he was responsible for the early morning quadruple homicide — perhaps the most talked-about crime in Idaho history. She felt for the victims' families, especially those upset that the death penalty was no longer an option with the plea bargain, but welcomed the case nearing its conclusion. 'I'm disgusted that he could actually do something so heinous,' she said. 'I understand why the families are so upset, they were starved for justice, and I would 100% be, too. However, there was never any guarantee that he'd be given the death penalty. So I think him taking the plea deal was better for everyone. 'He's locked up for life. Let the inside deal with him.' Thomas Arntz, 29, shared his sister's sentiments. The result Wednesday removed any chance his childhood friend could be acquitted and get away with murder, he said. 'I personally feel relieved with the acceptance of the guilty plea,' Arntz told the Statesman, adding he would pray for the four victims' families. 'I am deeply sorry that Bryan's parents have to live with this as well. … I've always thought they were kind people, and they didn't deserve this. And for Bryan, God have mercy on his soul.' 'He was kind of nonexistent' For Ben Roberts, 33, a former criminology graduate school colleague of Kohberger's at WSU, Wednesday's guilty pleas felt past due. The U.S. justice system is built upon the belief that a person is innocent until proven guilty, he said, and yet his former classmate's DNA at the crime scene, with no other suspects, strengthened his own suspicions. Still, Kohberger's arrest left him 'horrified,' he recalled. 'What surprises me at this point is that it dragged out so long, as I thought that a plea deal would never be reached,' Roberts told the Statesman by phone Thursday. 'My general impression was he was not going to stop fighting it, and to all of sudden have this about-face was very surprising — but a pleasant surprise.' Roberts spent several weeks just a few desks away from Kohberger in the days leading up to the close of the fall 2022 semester — just days and weeks after the murders. His graduate school classmate rarely exhibited much in the way of emotion around him, but also did not necessarily set off any red flags, he said. 'I noticed that unless he was deliberately trying to put on an appearance — if he didn't have the mask — he was kind of nonexistent, or hollow, I guess,' Roberts said. 'It's kind of like you're staring into an abyss. There's something human supposed to be there, and it isn't.' A casual hunter, Roberts said he's felt bad in the past when he's shot and killed a deer. He said he couldn't even fathom stabbing a person to death. 'I just can't even begin to get inside the head of somebody who could do something like that, and then attend class like it's business as usual,' Roberts said. 'That's just completely alien to me.' Roberts said he did not watch Wednesday's change-of-plea hearing. He didn't want to hear Kohberger's voice or see his face again, even though the latter has been difficult to escape the past two years, he noted. He was glad the high-profile case finally came to an end, and without the need for a monthslong trial. 'The first thing I said was that it was about damned time that the poor thing was put to rest,' Roberts said. 'We will heal' For now, the court's gag order in the closely watched case, which restricts attorneys and their agents — including members of law enforcement for the state — is still in effect. Thompson asked that it remain so through sentencing, which Kohberger's defense did not oppose. The University of Idaho released a statement this week after word broke that Kohberger planned to change his plea to guilty in the shocking crime. 'We keep the families of the victims in our hearts as each deals with this outcome in their own way,' the state's namesake university wrote in the statement. 'We will never forget the four incredible lives taken on King Road, they are forever Vandals and each holds a place in our Vandal Family. Since that fateful day in November 2022 our university has become stronger, more intent on its purpose and more supportive of each other. And while we will not forget, we will heal.' Similarly, Moscow Mayor Art Bettge, in office in 2022 when the murders took place and upended the community, shared optimism that the city's residents might finally be freed from the clutches of the tragic incident. 'I recognize and understand that we all desire justice for the victims and their families,' he said in an emailed statement. 'My heart, and that of our entire community, go out to the families of the victims. It is my hope that this resolution can begin to provide a small measure of closure for the families and our community. What is clear is that no matter what form justice would have taken, nothing will bring back Ethan, Madison, Xana, and Kaylee, and our world will be forever darkened because of it.' WSU's comment after Kohberger's hearing was more succinct. A Statesman request to speak with professors in its criminal justice and criminology department who knew and taught Kohberger, including the semester he killed the U of I students, was again declined. 'Our hearts go out to the families, friends and colleagues impacted,' WSU's statement read. 'We do not have anything to add at this time.' After Wednesday's hearing, one main question remains for everyone, including the victims' families: Why? Why did Bryan Kohberger choose to take these four young lives, thereby essentially also ending his own, to some degree? That question was on the mind of Casey Arntz, Kohberger's Pennsylvania friend thrust into the spotlight and forced to deal with her own form of grief over the past two-plus years. 'I wasn't as close to him as my brother or my other friends, but we still hung out and talked a lot,' she said. 'He was in my parents' house. I was alone with him. 'I guess the one thing I would say to him is what everyone wants to say to him: 'Why would you do this? Why would you take the innocent lives of four beautiful people?' I can't even begin to imagine what he would say. How does someone justify their actions when they're so morbid?'
