Star Tribune
As Burnsville shootings add to list of law enforcement fatalities, departments lean on each other
Sheriff Scott Knudson of St. Croix County, Wis., joined the procession on Sunday as hundreds of fellow law enforcement officers mourned two Burnsville policemen and a paramedic fatally shot a few hours earlier while working. As much as anyone, Knudson knows the pain involved.
Last May, St. Croix County Deputy Kaitie Leising was fatally shot while answering a call about a drunk driver in a ditch near Glenwood City. She was one in a grim, recent tally that grew to nine incidents on Sunday —the growing list of agencies in Minnesota and several neighboring states whose personnel have been killed or wounded on duty since April 2023.
“What got us through the weeks and months, and is still getting us through, is reaching out to each other and seeing how people are doing,” Knudson said Monday in an interview. “It is reaching out and sharing our shared grief.”
Burnsville Police officers Paul Elmstrand and Matthew Ruge, and Fire Department paramedic Adam Finseth, were carried in procession Sunday from Hennepin Healthcare in downtown Minneapolis to a medical examiner’s office in Minnetonka. Knudson said the outpouring from fellow law enforcement agencies and the public, in response to a “senseless act of extreme violence,” will be meaningful for the Burnsville Police and Fire departments in tough times ahead.
“It’s so important to be there for that agency and for the community to come together,” Knudson said. “That stuff means the world to us, but we need to see that. We need support from the community. We need those in the emergency world to lean on each other. This was a big blow.”
In the days following Leising’s death, neighboring agencies picked up patrol shifts for the St. Croix Sheriff’s office, leaving deputies time to grieve and stay home with their families. The agency held scores of debriefing sessions with a wellness component for deputies, family members, their children and others touched by the tragedy, for months following the incident. There were many phone calls traded as colleagues checked in on each other, Knudson said.
As news about Sunday’s shooting in Burnsville spread, Knudson said, the calls started again.
“Anxiety is high again,” he said. “Events like this reopen up everything in our office, in Cameron and Chetek (Wis.), Pope County and Fargo,” he added, referencing other police killings that have happened in region since last April. “It brings you right back to where you were, what you were feeling, helpless, hopeless. Officers in other agencies are probably feeling the same way.”
Knudson said his agency is standing with Burnsville because of the support St. Croix received during its time of need. But he said he is “saddened, sickened and angry” that police killings continue.
“Officers put themselves in harms way for people they have never met and get killed for it,” he said. “Something has to change. We are struggling to work through this. It is taking its toll. With words of encouragement, we will get through.”
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
