Vance Boelter, accused of assassination of DFL House leader Melissa Hortman, apprehended
Law enforcement officers on Sunday night arrested Vance Boelter, who is accused of assassinating Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home in Brooklyn Park as part of a larger plot to kill Democratic elected officials and other advocates of abortion rights.
Boelter is also accused of shooting Democratic-Farmer-Labor state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home in Champlin. Both Hoffmans survived the shooting, but received surgeries for their injuries and remain hospitalized.
The arrest comes after a 43-hour manhunt — the largest in state history, according to Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley. Law enforcement officers had been searching all day after locating Boelter's abandoned vehicle near Green Isle, where Boelter has a home.
At the time of his arrest, Boelter was armed, but ultimately surrendered. Officers did not use any force, said Lt. Col. Jeremy Geiger of the Minnesota State Patrol.
In the state's new Emergency Operations Center in Blaine — which was paid for by legislation passed by Hortman's DFL-controlled House in 2020 — Gov. Tim Walz thanked law enforcement and decried political violence and hateful rhetoric.
'This cannot be the norm. It cannot be the way that we deal with our political differences,' Walz said. 'Now is the time for us to recommit to the core values of this country, and each and every one of us can do it. Talk to a neighbor rather than argue, debate an issue, shake hands, find common ground.'
Boelter is a Christian who voted for President Donald Trump and opposes abortion and LGBTQ rights, according to interviews with his childhood friend and videos of his sermons posted online. A list of potential targets — including Hoffman and Hortman — included abortion providers and other Democratic elected officials from Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The attack, which has shocked Minnesotans and the nation, comes amid rising political violence since the emergence of President Donald Trump, who has made repeated threats of violence against his political enemies and praised his supporters who, for instance, attacked officers while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He later pardoned all of them. He survived two assassination attempts in 2024.
Authorities say Boelter attacked the Hoffmans at their home in Champlin at approximately 2 a.m. on Saturday morning. An unsealed criminal complaint indicates that the Hoffmans' daughter called the police to report the shooting of her parents, the Associated Press reports.
At around 3:30 a.m., Brooklyn Park police headed to the Hortmans' home to proactively check on them following the attack on the Hoffmans, said Drew Evans, superintendent at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension at a press conference Saturday morning.
When they arrived, the officers saw the attacker in a fake law enforcement uniform shoot Mark Hortman through the open front door, according to the complaint. Out front, emergency vehicle lights flashed from a Ford Explorer outfitted to look like a cop car. When the officers confronted the shooter, a gunfight ensued, and the killer escaped, abandoning the vehicle.
Inside, Hortman and her husband, Mark, were dead from gunshot wounds.
In the SUV, police found a document with a list of lawmakers and other officials on it. Hortman and Hoffman were on the list.
Evans said Sunday that the document is not a 'traditional manifesto that's a treatise on all kinds of ideology and writings.' Instead, it contains a list of names and 'other thoughts' throughout.
On Saturday afternoon, police raided a home in north Minneapolis where Boelter lived part time. In an interview with the Star Tribune and other media outlets, Boelter's roommate and childhood friend David Carlson shared a text message Boelter sent him at 6:03 a.m. saying that he would be 'gone for a while' and 'may be dead shortly.'
Federal and state warrants were out for Boelter's arrest, and the FBI was offering a $50,000 award for information that led to Boelter's capture.
On Sunday morning, law enforcement officers detained and questioned Boelter's wife as she was driving through Mille Lacs County with other family members. Evans said Sunday none of Boelter's family members are in custody.
Sunday afternoon, law enforcement officers located a car linked to Boelter in Sibley County within a few miles of his home address in Green Isle. From there, teams from dozens of law enforcement agencies fanned out in search of Boelter.
Boelter was spotted in the area, and officers converged around him, Evans said. He declined to provide some details of the tactics used by law enforcement to capture Boelter.
Law enforcement officials continue to investigate Boelter's motives, Evans said, and urged the public not to jump to conclusions.
'We often want easy answers for complex problems, and this is a complex situation…those answers will come as we complete the full picture of our investigation,' he said.
Minnesota House Democratic leader dead after targeted shooting; Democratic senator also shot
Fragments of Boelter's life available online, and interviews with those who know him, shed light on his religious and political beliefs.
Boelter's LinkedIn page indicates that he spent many years working in food production before becoming the general manager of a 7-Eleven. More recently, he worked at funeral homes, the New York Times reported.
Boelter was facing financial stress after quitting his job to embark on business ventures in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to Carlson, the Star Tribune reported.
The website for a private security firm lists Boelter as the 'director of security patrols,' and his wife as the CEO. He purchased some cars and uniforms but 'it was never a real company,' Carlson told the Strib.
Carlson said Boelter is a Christian who strongly opposes abortion, the New York Times reported.
In recordings of sermons Boelter delivered in Matadi, a city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he railed against abortion and LGBTQ people.
The reporting on Boelter's religious life suggests that his beliefs were rooted in fundamentalism, though he doesn't appear to have been ordained in any particular denomination, said Rev. Angela Denker, a Minnesota-based Lutheran minister, journalist and author of books on Christianity, right-wing politics and masculinity.
'What this kind of theology says is that if you commit violence in the name of whatever movement you're a part of, then you're going to be rewarded,' Denker said.
The gunman shot John Hoffman nine times, and Yvette Hoffman eight times, according to a statement from Yvette.
The Hoffmans' nephew, Mat Ollig, wrote on Facebook that Yvette used her body to shield her daughter. John Hoffman is 'enduring many surgeries right now and is closer every hour to being out of the woods,' Yvette Hoffman said in a statement.
On Sunday night as leaders spoke to the press, Boelter was being questioned by law enforcement, but officials declined to say where he was detained and which agency was questioning him.
On the steps of the State Capitol Sunday, mourners created an extemporaneous memorial for Hortman, who will be known as one of the most consequential progressive leaders in recent state history.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
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New York Post
34 minutes ago
- New York Post
Just say no to Big Dope — and its push for even more legal marijuana
Will more marijuana use make America a better place? Not many who've seen and smelled what legalizing the drug has done to cities like New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco would say so. Yet President Donald Trump is contemplating a change to marijuana's federal classification that would make it easier to buy and more profitable to sell. The pot industry — Big Dope — is heavily invested in getting its product recategorized from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 drug. Industry leaders ponied up for a $1-million-a-plate Trump fundraising dinner earlier this month to hear what the president had in mind, according to The Wall Street Journal. The president should ignore the well-funded cannabis lobby: What matters is what more and cheaper marijuana will mean for ordinary Americans. Twenty-four states have legalized recreational use of the drug, despite the ugly results experienced by the first state to do so. 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That would be a bad argument even without evidence like Lee's, which suggests legal weed makes crime worse. After all, any profit-driven criminal enterprise could be shut down by simply legalizing the crime in question. If bank robbery were legal, bank robbers wouldn't need to use guns. If auto theft were legal, carjackers wouldn't have to use force, and there wouldn't be any violence associated with black-market chop shops because the chop shops would all be as legal as the commercial marijuana industry is today. Legalize everything Tony Soprano does, and Tony won't have to get rough — but he'll only do more of what he was doing before. Libertarians who argue for legalizing drugs to stop drug violence are closer than they realize to the radical leftists who argue property crimes shouldn't be prosecuted. The psychology is the same: They sympathize with the people who make it harder to live in a civilized society and reject society's right to defend its rules. There are downsides to laws against marijuana, just as there are costs to protecting private property and citizens' bodily safety. But the costs are well worth paying when the alternative is passivity in the face of aggression, handing your belongings or your life over to any thug who makes a demand. For a time marijuana legalization was sold to voters as just a matter of leaving people alone to consume whatever they want in private, without bothering anybody else. Yet millions of Americans have now lived long enough with pot legalization, or the non-enforcement of laws still on the books, to know the pot lobby perpetrated a fraud. What the country has actually had to deal with is pot smoking so rife in public that the offensive smell — and the sight and sounds of intoxication — smacks you in your face. It's hardly different from dope-users blowing smoke right in your eyes on the street. That's not the worst crime in the world — but neither is shoplifting, and there's no reason to tolerate that, either. Tolerating such things only breeds more tolerance for worse abuses, which is what has led progressives to treat even violent criminals with the utmost leniency. Two scenes in the suburbs of DC convinced me pot tolerance has gone too far. First was seeing an African-American bus driver, on a blazing hot summer day, order two dope-smoking teens to put out their joints and be aware there were children around. To the extent our cities work at all it's because of working-class men like him — and the rest of us have to decide whether we're on his side or the punks'. A year or so later I watched a young mother one bright October afternoon hold her small daughter's hand as they walked through a neighborhood reeking of high-potency pot. The multibillion-dollar weed industry got to advertise its product to a little girl about 4 years old that day. It's an industry that notoriously even sells its drug in candy form, as 'gummies.' Our cities and towns shouldn't be open-air drug dens — and Trump shouldn't let a lobby get high off of making Americans' lives worse. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
