Star Tribune
Nicolae Miu’s attorneys suggest victims provoked fatal Apple River stabbing
A defense attorney for a Nicolae Miu, accused of first-degree intentional homicide in a 2022 mass stabbing on the Apple River, asked a prosecution witness Monday morning if his group’s “taunting” of Miu provoked the stabbing.
Defense attorney Corey Chirafisi hammered at Owen Peloquin of Afton, who was a rising senior at Stillwater High School when he went on a tubing trip in July 2022 that ended in the stabbing death of Stillwater teen Isaac Schuman.
Peloquin testified that his group was floating the Wisconsin river when they spotted Miu, then 52, alone in the knee-deep water. One in the group shouted that Miu, of Prior Lake, was a “raper.”
“He was looking really weird, and we were kids,” Peloquin testified.
Chirafisi intimated Peloquin’s group was responsible for the escalation because they were recording it on cell phones, and that they easily could have floated past Miu instead of accosting him.
Miu, who is standing trial in St. Croix County Circuit Court, also faces four counts of attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the stabbings of four others that day. He faces the possibility of life in prison.
Throughout the trial, Miu’s attorneys have consistently questioned defense witnesses about their behavior that day, portraying them as unnecessarily antagonistic toward Miu. Miu’s attorneys have questioned prosecution witnesses about why they began calling Miu a pedophile.
Several in Schuman’s group testified they heard Miu say he was “looking for little girls,” blaming that comment on starting the confrontation. But Chirafisi has pointed out the “little girls” comment wasn’t captured on video and that witnesses didn’t mention it to police after the incident.
On Monday, the sixth day of trial, Peloquin testified Miu saying “something about little girls” sparked the confrontation.
“Couldn’t really make out fully what he said, but I heard him say something about little girls, and that didn’t sit right with any of us,” Peloquin testified. “We were screaming at him, ‘Pedophile, get out of here!’ ‘You’re a weirdo!’ What a normal person would do.”
But Chirafisi continued to insinuate it was Schuman’s group that instigated the fatal confrontation.
“It was all so quick,” Peloquin replied. “We were just young kids that were curious what was going on, and we wanted to see it finish what we were seeing.”
“You wanted to see it finish because it was on tape, right?” Chirafisi questioned. “Jawahn Cockfield was videotaping this entire thing, isn’t he? You wanted to see how this tape played out.”
“I wouldn’t say we ever did it just for, like, a camera, like a video,” Peloquin said, adding that his group observed Miu talking with two young women and didn’t want to leave them alone until they observed how the conversation played out because “he scared us.”
Chirafisi showed stills from a video of the confrontation, showing several in Schuman’s group surrounding Miu, pointing and chanting at him.
Chirafisi: “Do you believe your actions there with the rest of your friends are taunting him?”
Peloquin: “It could be considered that, yeah.”
Chirafisi: “Would you agree the more you guys are calling him names — pedophile, predator — the higher the temperature is getting? Meaning the more aggravated people are getting?”
Peloquin: “I don’t know other people’s feelings… By the end, I was in complete shock because I saw a bunch of people stabbed.”
Also on Monday morning, the surgeon who tended to A.J. Martin, one of the victims who survived, testified that the case stood out from all the previous trauma incidents he’d worked on.
“I’ve not had a patient with that large of a penetrating wound previously,” said the surgeon, Brian Myer.
Martin had previously testified that he told the surgeon he was going to die. Martin’s heart stopped for nine minutes on the helicopter en route to the hospital, and then again in the hospital. He spent 27 days in the hospital and had multiple follow-up surgeries.
The trial before St. Croix County Circuit Court judge R. Michael Waterman is expected to last through the end of this week.
State environmental regulators are suing the Lake County Planning Commission to try to stop a developer from building 49 new cabins at a century-old fishing resort on an entry lake to the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said that the planning board ignored local and state shoreline protection rules to allow the Silver Rapids Resort on Farm Lake to build the cabins. The project would accompany an extensive remodel and renovation to a motel and restaurant on the site that would also increase the size and number of docks.
The agency asked a district court judge in a suit filed Oct. 3 to throw out the resort’s permit for the construction. A hearing is scheduled for November and no work will be allowed to start while the case is pending. A group of homeowners in the area opposed to the project filed a separate lawsuit that also seeks to overturn the resort’s permit.
Alex Campbell, the environmental service specialist for the planning commission, declined to comment on ongoing litigation. Commission member and Lake County Board Chair Rich Sve did not return phone calls seeking an interview. Sandy Hoff, one of the site’s developers, did not return messages seeking comment.
Silver Rapids opened in 1919 as a fishing resort on a stretch of shore where White Iron Lake meets the western edge of Farm Lake. The Boundary Waters begins on Farm Lake’s eastern shore a couple miles from the resort. It has 12 small cabins on site, an 11-room motel, a restaurant and 21 campsites.
Developers asked the county planning commission for a permit to allow an $45 million expansion that would include a remodel of the restaurant, the installation of a tiki bar and the building of 49 new cabins that would each be sold to up to four owners apiece and rented out when those owners aren’t using them.
The expansion would increase the total number of dwelling units on the site from 13 to 62 and add 12 new docks with space for 75 boats.
But the county’s shoreline protection rules, which were written in the 1990s, allow the resort a maximum of 29 dwelling units and docks that could fit a maximum of 14 boats, the DNR argued in its complaint.
“People stopped paying rent because they didn’t have to, and you couldn’t evict them for it, and it’s just became a free for all where people didn’t respect the place where they were staying or living anymore, and the management couldn’t hold people accountable,” Faust said.
The turning point came when the city, Aeon and tenant advocacy groups like the Village BP started collaborating in earnest, issuing weekly memos to communicate what actions they were taking to claw back control of Huntington Place. Aeon hired an armed patrol, installed security cameras and erected a fence to restrict movement in and out of its parking lot, spending $1.353 million annually from 2021 to 2024. The police raided the units of drug dealers and Aeon jettisoned them as the moratorium eased. City staff door-knocked floor by floor, issuing repair orders for discharged fire extinguishers that were never replaced, unpatched holes in the wall, mold, water damage, mice and roaches. Repairs improved the look and feel of the complex. The addition of sidewalks helped residents walk to the bus stop, and speed bumps broke up the roadway near the front checkpoint area that had been nicknamed the “racetrack.”
Crime stats paint the picture of a massive ship yawing straight. Between 2022 and 2023, there was a 56.6% plunge in violent crime. The trend continues downward.
Longtime resident Ernie Jackson said he and his wife Kim used to only leave their apartment to let their dog out because, “You know, who wants to be involved in the chaos and craziness?” But since security was restored, he’s spent a significant amount of time this summer soaking up the sun in his lawn chair.
Aeon has informed them that residents need not worry about displacement because affordable housing covenants will follow the property through January 2050. The Jacksons are heartened by that. Still, Kim wonders whether the new owner will maintain the social support services that Aeon worked with city and community partners to offer — the school supply giveaways, the health resource fairs and vaccine outreach, pizza nights with police, and the teen outings to Dunwoody College.
Not much is known about MAS Capital locally. It doesn’t own any other affordable housing projects in the Twin Cities region, and the firm did not respond to questions from the Star Tribune about its long-term intentions.
Star Tribune
Twin Cities man gets 5 years in prison for romance scheme that raked in more than $2M million
A Brooklyn Park man received more than five years in prison Tuesday for perpetrating with others a nationwide romance fraud scheme for four years and pulling in more than $2.1 million.
Dodzi K. Kordorwu, 38, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in St. Paul to a 5¼-year term after pleading guilty to the online ruse that targeted dozens of primarily older people.
Judge Eric Tostrud also ordered Kordorwu to be under court supervision for three years after his release and to make full restitution of the money he stole.
The FBI says about 24,000 victims in the United States reported losing about $1 billion to romance scams in 2021. Researchers say romance scammers prey specifically on seniors, some capitalizing on the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic to find lonely victims.
Ahead of sentencing, prosecutors argued in a court filing for Kordowu to be given a sentence of nearly seven years in prison.
While taking on the persona of “Dr. Carmen Williams” to interact with one victim, Kordowu “directly expressed his love [and] promised to never leave them,” the prosecution filing read.
Upon receiving a monetary shipment, Kordorwu followed up with “‘thank you so much my sweet and beautiful wife. I love you, and I will always love you,’” the filing continued. “The deeply personal connections forged by these overtures is what made the fraud scheme so potent.”
The defense proposed in writing to the court for a sentence of probation, contended that he had a limited role in the scam, the crime was nonviolent in nature, and “Mr. Kordorwu is the sole person being held responsible for the offense.”
Russian disinformation groups promoting false claims about Gov. Tim Walz, experts say
Georgia Supreme Court won’t step in to reinstate controversial election rules
Georgia Supreme Court won’t step in to reinstate controversial election rules
Russian disinformation groups promoting false claims about Gov. Tim Walz, experts say
Georgia Supreme Court won’t step in to reinstate controversial election rules