Star Tribune
Legally bought guns turning up at crime scenes faster than ever in Minnesota, nationally
A South St. Paul teen shot dead outside his home in a botched drug deal. Bullets peppered throughout a crowded St. Paul bar. A gun stolen from a Ham Lake home fired at motorcyclists less than a half hour later.
Legally bought firearms are showing up at crime scenes in Minnesota — and nationally — faster than ever, in part a reflection of a more concerted effort by law enforcement to trace guns used in crimes back to those who, in some cases, helped deliver them to the shooters.
“These are not the people who pulled the trigger, but the trigger doesn’t get pulled without them,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, who chairs a violent crime committee of top federal prosecutors around the country.
Luger, who started his second term vowing to make violent crime and gun cases a top priority, said in an interview last week that he believed his office will now bring forward more cases against people who buy firearms for those banned from owning them — often referred to as “straw purchasers” — “than ever before.”
Recent federal straw purchasing cases have been linked to high-profile fatal shootings from around the metro in the past year. Federal law enforcement leaders also remain concerned about stolen firearms later being used in violent crimes.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) is continuing to recover and trace a record number of firearms used in crimes in Minnesota. The ATF reported recently that it recovered and traced 4,605 firearms in Minnesota last year — up from 4,072 in 2020.
Among those firearms, the ATF is tallying an ongoing, precipitous decline in the average time between a gun’s legal purchase date and the date it turned up at a crime scene. That figure was 6.27 years in 2021, down from 7.34 in 2020 and 8.43 years in 2019. Minnesota’s average is dropping in a pattern consistent with the national trend over that same period: from a little more than 8 years before the pandemic to just over 6 years in 2021.
Luger and other local federal law enforcement supervisors are careful to qualify that the startling data is at least partly attributable to more work by investigators to determine how shooters first got their hands on the guns they’re using.
“We’re trying to put as many links on that chain together to find out exactly how it left the lawful stream of commerce and got into its status as a ‘crime gun,'” said William McCrary, special agent in charge of the ATF’s St. Paul division, which also covers Wisconsin and the Dakotas.
A spike in new firearm owners during the pandemic has made the job of trying to spot problematic gun buyers trickier, said John Munson, whose Bill’s Gun Shop & Range operates five locations between Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota.
“We follow the letter of the law with reporting,” Munson said. “I think most do. There’s some human error here and there, but the reality is it is hard to catch people sometimes. Sometimes it’s very easy.”
Staff at Frontiersman Sports in St. Louis Park last year helped law enforcement piece together the case against Jerome Fletcher Horton Jr. — who has since been convicted and sentenced to two years in prison for supplying a pistol used the October 2021 Seventh Street Truck Park shooting that killed one woman and injured 14 others.
Horton bought that gun from a Fleet Farm in Blaine before it made its way to the eventual shooter. He aroused enough suspicion at the St. Louis Park store last year that an employee took handwritten notes on his conduct that was later turned over to law enforcement. Criminal charges against Horton also noted surveillance footage showing him waving two gun boxes in the air at people waiting for him outside the store after a successful purchase.
According to court documents, a review by investigators showed that federally licensed firearms sellers documented the purchase of 33 firearms by Horton from stores around the Twin Cities metro between June 15, 2021, through October 17, 2021 — a week after the Truck Park shooting.
James Becker, a federal defender representing Horton, wrote in a pre-sentencing memo that “this case is about a young person who agreed to purchase firearms for other people who were prohibited from doing so, without initial regard for the consequences of doing so.”
Luger said it was his view that “some of the straw purchasers delude themselves into believing that they are not connected to the actual violence that ensues.”
“We need to be very public about this connection: If you put this weapon into an illegal stream of commerce, you are responsible for what happens to it,” Luger said.
Two new federal criminal cases charged this month further highlight just how quickly firearms can transfer from legal possession to instruments of violence.
The Springfield Armory Hellcat 9mm pistol used in the May 8 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Anthony Skelley outside his South St. Paul home was later traced to a legal purchase 159 days earlier by Wayne Danielson, 200 miles away in Virginia, Minn.
An ATF agent then linked Danielson to multiple other firearms seized by law enforcement and documented 50 guns purchased by Danielson from licensed dealers between May 2019 and August 2022. The agent noted that Danielson bought the same firearms multiple times throughout that period.
When law enforcement searched his home earlier this year, Danielson admitted to buying firearms with the intent to resell them online using Armslist — a classified advertisements website devoted to firearms.
He told investigators that he would use the site to find purchasers before doing business together via text message. Danielson said that he would sell guns when he needed extra funds, adding “guns are just like money,” according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by the Star Tribune.
Federal prosecutors charged Danielson last week via criminal complaint with dealing firearms without a license.
Also last week, prosecutors charged Carson Thomas McCoy with illegally possessing a firearm after he stole a Springfield Armory .45 cal Model XD Mod-2 handgun and other items from a Ham Lake home in August. Less than a half hour after the burglary, according to the criminal complaint against McCoy, a BMW sedan stolen and driven by McCoy became involved in an altercation with a group of motorcyclists in which someone from the BMW fired shots out of the car’s sunroof at the bikers.
McCoy and a female passenger were later arrested after the vehicle crashed into an Anoka County Sheriff’s Office squad car and a tree during a pursuit.
A federal defender representing both men declined to comment on their cases when reached last week.
The case comes amid an ongoing plea from law enforcement supervisors such as McCrary, who is urging lawful gun owners to do all they can to safeguard their firearms.
“Please don’t leave your guns in your car,” McCrary said. “If you’re going to carry a gun, use your permit and carry it. Bring it in at night and if you keep one in your house and you’re going to leave your house for something, put it in a lockbox to secure it.”
“That would do a lot toward keeping a significant number of guns off the street.”
Not all of the interviews were negative; a fair amount of players and parents reported positive experiences with Randolph, some saying they never witnessed him belittling players.
“To me, he was fabulous,” one parent said, noting their child “blossomed” under Randolph.
Terch wrote he was not able to substantiate an allegation that Randolph received payments from the East End Hockey Boosters, although he did find “unusual financial management practices” by the booster club, including a misrepresentation to parents about the use of at least some of what they paid, a commingling of funds between events and “unorthodox” accounting practices. Several parents said they felt they had overpaid many times without explanation. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began investigating the former East hockey booster club in 2023 for alleged embezzlement. The status of that case is unknown.
In response to the report’s release, Duluth Public Schools Superintendent John Magas said in a statement that he can’t discuss personnel matters, but the district takes all reports from students and families “very seriously.”
“Our primary goal is to ensure that students have the best possible experiences, both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities,” he said. “We are committed to thoroughly investigating any concerns brought to our attention and taking appropriate action” to maintain safe and positive learning environments.
St. Thomas Academy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gas prices would increase by as much as 75 cents per gallon in the Midwest, where most refined products come from Canada, according to Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy. Overall, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said Trump’s tariffs would cost the typical household $2,600 per year; the Yale Budget Lab said in an estimate released Wednesday that the annual cost could be as high as $7,600 for a typical household. As a share of their income, the poorest Americans would pay 6 percent more with 20 percent tariffs, compared with 1.4 percent more for the richest 1 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank.
“We’re not talking about caviar — these are things that people have to buy. They’re essentials,” said Neil Saunders, a managing director at the analytics company GlobalData.
Economists say it would take several painful years for alternative domestic producers to emerge for many goods. For instance, almost all shoes and 90 percent of tomatoes sold in the country are imported, according to the Peterson Institute. And the United States does not even have the climate necessary to produce many food items – such as coffee, bananas, avocados, to say nothing of Chilean sea bass – at the necessary scale to meet domestic demand, said Joseph Politano, an economic analyst who has written on the subject on his Substack.
Trump’s tariffs would also reverberate through Wall Street and global markets, inviting turmoil that would affect investors and companies worldwide. Those effects would probably be felt quickly.
During Trump’s first term, stocks fell on nine of 11 days in 2018 and 2019 that the United States or China announced new tariffs, according to a study this year by economists with the Federal Reserve and Columbia University. Comprehensive tariffs would cause a swift one-time jump in prices before reducing economic growth about six months later, according to economist David Page, head of macro research for AXA Investment Managers in London.
Many analysts are hopeful that a stock market panic would dissuade or prevent Trump from carrying out his plans. The investment bank UBS projected that a 10 percent universal tariff could lead to a 10 percent contraction in the stock market. U.S. multinationals are heavily dependent on foreign subsidiaries, and retailers, auto manufacturers and other industrial sectors would be hit the hardest, according to UBS. Chris McNally, an analyst at Evercore, said Trump’s 10 percent tariff plan could cause a more than 20 percent decline in General Motors’ earnings, with slightly smaller declines for Ford and Stellantis.
Star Tribune
On the Wisconsin-Iowa border, the Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds
Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as is William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, which includes removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.
Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.
But, she pointed out, “The bank is (already) no longer what it was.”
When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.
The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.
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