In the early morning hours of Dec. 16, 2022, St. Paul, Minnesota, homicide detectives Abby DeSanto and Jennifer O’Donnell were called to a downtown apartment building to investigate a reported suicide. A 32-year-old woman named Alexandra Pennig had been found dead in her bathroom with a single gunshot wound to the head.

For the detectives, what really happened to Pennig is something that still haunts them to this day. And it’s the question at the center of “The Strange Shooting of Alex Pennig,” reported by “48 Hours” contributor Natalie Morales airing Saturday, Oct. 26 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

When detectives DeSanto and O’Donnell arrived at the apartment, they found out Pennig had not been alone at the time of her death. A man named Matthew Ecker was also there. Ecker and Pennig were both nurses and had met two years earlier when they worked at the same clinic. Ecker told first responders the gun was his, and that Pennig had grabbed it, locked herself in the bathroom, and then fired the shot. “I thought everything was fine,” he said. “And then she just grabbed the gun.” Ecker told first responders that after he heard the shot he immediately broke open the bathroom door: “I tried to do what I could. And then I washed my hands … That’s why I don’t have anything on my hands.” Ecker said he then called 911. But it was too late. He said he didn’t know why Pennig would do this.

In Pennig’s apartment, there was alcohol and six bottles of prescription medication, including antidepressants, all prescribed to Pennig. For the detectives, it suggested Alex might have been depressed, and they wondered if Ecker’s story that she took her own life was true.

But they also noticed something that seemed to contradict Ecker’s story. He had said he washed his hands in the bathroom sink before calling 911, but DeSanto recalled the first responders told her the sink was dry. “The sink was dry. If he had said, you know, he called the police right away, that sink probably would’ve been still wet,” DeSanto explained, “but it was very dry in there.”

When O’Donnell looked into Pennig’s background, she learned from Alex’s parents that Alex had struggled in the past with depression and addiction. “I had asked, um, if she had been suicidal in the past, um, and dad said, she had, um, tried, uh, to overdose before,” said O’Donnell. According to Alex’s father, Jim Pennig, several years prior, Alex had taken a handful of pills “and then had told her mom that she was attempting suicide.” After that, Alex’s parents told the detectives they sent her to rehab, and she eventually got clean. Despite her past struggles, Alex’s parents told O’Donnell they had just seen her at Thanksgiving. And her mom, Mary Jo Pennig, had just talked to her that evening. “She was doing well,” she said. For them, the idea that their daughter had died by suicide did not make sense. “Knowing your kid, it didn’t fit,” Mary Jo Pennig said.

Since Ecker was the last person to see Alex Pennig alive, the detectives zeroed in on him. “He’s the only one that can tell us what happened. He was the only one that was there,” said O’Donnell. They questioned Ecker about what had happened that night. He said he and Alex Pennig had gone out to several local bars, and when they arrived back at her place, everything was fine: “We were laughing on the way home,” said Ecker. DeSanto asked him if, once they got into the apartment, they had gotten into a fight. Ecker said they did not.

DET. ABBY DESANTO: You guys weren’t arguing or anything?

MATTHEW ECKER: No.

DET. ABBY DESANTO: There’s no fight with you two?

MATTHEW ECKER: Not between us. 

For hours, Ecker continued to say Pennig had locked herself in the bathroom, fired the shot and then he broke open the door to try and help her: “That gun went off behind a closed door … I did not shoot her.“

But the detectives had their doubts. Then they got a call from the forensic unit that was still processing the scene. And according to O’Donnell, what they found changed everything. “Once Alex was moved, they found underneath where Alex had been laying was a round metal piece,“ she said. “It was the shape of a ring, and about the size of a quarter.” O’Donnell said it was part of the lock from the bathroom door, and the fact that it had been discovered under Pennig was key. “For us, it meant that the door was forced open before she was shot.”

The detectives felt the discovery of the metal ring proved Ecker had lied and had not broken the door open after he heard the shot. The detectives suspected Pennig and Ecker had argued and that she had locked the bathroom door to get away from him. Then Ecker broke open the door, the metal part broke off and fell to the ground, and then he shot Pennig and she landed on top of it.

Ecker was charged with second-degree murder. In February 2024 he was convicted and later sentenced to 30 years. He is appealing his conviction.

Multiple clashes on Thursday between Mexican security forces and alleged criminals left at least 16 people dead in the violence-plagued southern state of Guerrero, the military said, on the same day that a car bomb left outside a police station in western Mexico wounded three officers. 

A first skirmish occurred in the town of Tecpan de Galeana, near the Pacific coast, where two were killed and four more injured.

Later, security forces battled with a criminal group that had attacked a military base in the same area, killing 14 gunmen, according to a statement by the SEDENA national defense secretariat.

Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, has endured years of violence linked to turf wars between cartels fighting for control of drug production and trafficking.

Last year, 1,890 murders were recorded in the state, which is home to the beachside resort city of Acapulco, a former playground of the rich and famous now blighted by crime.

In early October, the mayor of Guerrero’s capital city was killed less than a week after taking office, with his decapitation sparking outrage around the country and demands for more protection.

Farther north on Thursday, in Guanajuato state, a car bomb detonated outside a police station, wounding three officers, local officials said.

The blast damaged the police station, four houses and several homes but the police officers were the only people hurt, the department said.

Officials said another explosion, apparently a second car bomb, occurred in the nearby town of Jerecuaro. Although nobody was wounded, the force of that second blast was enough to blow the tile roof off a building, blacken the facades of surrounding stores and set alight a police patrol pickup truck.

The near-simultaneous attacks in two different towns located about a half-hour away from each other suggested the involvement of drug cartels that have been fighting bloody turf battles for years in Guanajuato.

The central region is a thriving industrial hub and home to several popular tourist destinations, but it is also now considered Mexico’s most violent state.

On October 4, the bodies of 12 slain police officers were found in different areas of Salamanca, a town in Guanajuato.

Cartel wars persist

Officials say violence in the state stems from a conflict between the local Santa Rosa de Lima gang and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, one of the most powerful in all of Mexico.

“I want to be very emphatic: our priority is the pacification of Guanajuato, and we will achieve this complex task together,” state governor Libia Garcia said on social media after Thursday’s attack.

She said an air and ground operation had been launched involving state security forces to support the municipal police.

Mexico has suffered more than 450,000 drug-related killings since the government started using the military to fight the cartels in 2006.

President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office on October 1, has pledged to continue her predecessor’s “hugs not bullets” strategy of using social policy to tackle crime at its roots, while also making better use of intelligence.

“The war on drugs will not return,” she said, referring to the U.S.-backed offensive launched in 2006.

The northwestern cartel stronghold of Sinaloa has also seen a spike in violence since the July arrest of drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in the United States. Last month, he pleaded not guilty in a U.S. drug trafficking case that accuses him of engaging in murder plots and ordering torture.

On Monday, Mexican troops shot dead 19 suspected Sinaloa Cartel members after coming under attack.

Zambada’s capture triggered infighting between his supporters and gunmen loyal to imprisoned cartel founder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and his sons.

Zambada accused Joaquin Guzman Lopez,– one of El Chapo’s sons who led a faction of the cartel known as the “Chapitos” — of kidnapping him and handing him over to U.S. law enforcement.

According to an indictment released by the U.S. Justice Department last year, the “Chapitos” and their cartel associates used corkscrews, electrocution and hot chiles to torture their rivals while some of their victims were “fed dead or alive to tigers.” El Chapo’s sons were among 28 Sinaloa cartel members charged in a massive fentanyl-trafficking investigation announced in April 2023.

El Chapo is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado after being convicted in 2019 on charges including drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons-related offenses.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Columbus, Ohio — The most far-reaching of Ohio’s laws restricting abortion was struck down on Thursday by a county judge who said last year’s voter-approved amendment enshrining reproductive rights renders the so-called heartbeat law unconstitutional.

Enforcement of the 2019 law banning most abortions once cardiac activity is detected – as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they’re pregnant – had been paused pending the challenge before Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Christian Jenkins.

Jenkins said that when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned power over the abortion issue to the states, “Ohio’s Attorney General evidently didn’t get the memo.”

The judge said Republican Attorney General Dave Yost’s request to leave all but one provision of the law untouched even after a majority of Ohio’s voters passed an amendment protecting the right to pre-viability abortion “dispels the myth” that the high court’s decision simply gives states power over the issue.

“Despite the adoption of a broad and strongly worded constitutional amendment, in this case and others, the State of Ohio seeks not to uphold the constituional protection of abortion rights, but to diminish and limit it,” he wrote. Jenkins said his ruling upholds voters’ wishes.

Yost’s office said it was reviewing the order and would decide within 30 days whether to appeal.

“This is a very long, complicated decision covering many issues, many of which are issues of first impression,” the office said in a statement, meaning they have not been decided by a court before.

Jenkins’ decision comes in a lawsuit that the ACLU of Ohio, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the law firm WilmerHale brought on behalf of a group of abortion providers in the state, the second round of litigation filed to challenge the law.

“This is a momentous ruling, showing the power of Ohio’s new Reproductive Freedom Amendment in practice,” Jessie Hill, cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Ohio, said in a statement. “The six-week ban is blatantly unconstitutional and has no place in our law.”

An initial lawsuit was brought in federal court in 2019, where the law was first blocked under the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It was briefly allowed to go into effect in 2022 after Roe was overturned. Opponents of the law then turned to the state court system, where the ban was again put on hold. They argued the law violated protections in Ohio’s constitution that guarantee individual liberty and equal protection, and that it was unconstitutionally vague.

After his predecessor twice vetoed the measure citing Roe, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed the 2019 law once appointments by then-President Donald Trump had solidified the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and raised hopes among abortion opponents.

The Ohio litigation has unfolded alongside a national upheaval over abortion rights that followed the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, including constitutional amendment pushes in Ohio and a host of other states. Issue 1, the amendment Ohio voters passed last year, gives every person in Ohio “the right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.”

Yost acknowledged in court filings this spring that the amendment rendered the Ohio ban unconstitutional, but sought to maintain other elements of the 2019 law, including certain notification and reporting provisions.

Jenkins said retaining those elements would have meant subjecting doctors who perform abortions to felony criminal charges, fines, license suspensions or revocations, and civil claims of wrongful death – and requiring patients to make two in-person visits to their provider, wait 24 hours for the procedure and have their abortion recorded and reported.