Star Tribune
Two police officers, first responder shot and killed in Burnsville, Minnesota
Two Burnsville police officers and a Fire Department paramedic were shot and killed at a home early Sunday morning after an hourslong standoff following a domestic abuse call.
The gunman, who had barricaded himself inside the home with a woman and seven children, died after turning his weapon on himself, authorities said.
Officers were sent to the residence in the 12600 block of 33rd Avenue S. just before 2 a.m. and attempted to communicate with those inside. Several hours later, gunfire erupted, striking three officers and the firefighter/paramedic as he tended to one of the wounded.
The dead were identified as officers Paul Elmstrand and Matthew Ruge, both 27, and firefighter/paramedic Adam Finseth, 40.
Police Sgt. Adam Medlicott was hospitalized with gunshot wounds but was expected to survive, city officials said.
“This is a hard day. It’s a really hard day for our public safety family. We’re hurting; we’re hurting,” Burnsville Police Chief Tanya Schwartz said at an afternoon news conference. “Today three members of our team made the ultimate sacrifice for this community. They are heroes.”
BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said the standoff began after a 1:50 a.m. call about domestic abuse in a middle-class neighborhood near Terrace Oaks East Park in southeast Burnsville. According to the caller, the man was armed and barricaded inside the single-family home with the woman and children ages 2 to 15.
Evans said there had not been a significant history of police calls to the home before Sunday.
Gunfire erupted about 5:30 a.m. Evans said the suspect, whom he declined to identify, fired at officers as they tried to negotiate with him to leave the house.
At least one of the officers was inside the house, Evans said, and it was not clear where the others were. Shots were fired from the upper and main levels of the home.
Evans confirmed that an armored vehicle — with a bullet-riddled windshield — took part in the operation. “Which was why it was shot,” he said.
Evans said the suspect was dead by 8 a.m., but the others inside the house escaped injury. Law enforcement sources confirmed that the suspect killed himself.
The BCA was investigating, and Evans said the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office will release the suspect’s cause of death.
Elmstrand was a five-year veteran of the Police Department, who served on its mobile command staff, peer team, honor guard and field training unit. He joined the department as a community service officer in 2017 and was promoted to an officer two years later.
Ruge joined the force in April 2020 and was a member of the crisis negotiations team. Finseth had been a Burnsville firefighter and paramedic since February 2019.
By noon Sunday, several hundred officers from police departments across the metro gathered outside HCMC in downtown Minneapolis, where the three dead were taken. They stood vigil before the American-flag draped bodies were carried in a procession to the Medical Examiner’s Office in Minnetonka.
According to emergency dispatch audio, when police determined just after 4:30 a.m. that several firearms were in the home, an officer on the scene radioed the suspect’s first name and physical description. “He’s dangerous. … Currently negotiating with him upstairs still,” the officer said. “He’s refusing to come out.”
As negotiations continued, an officer called in: “It seems the children are getting a little antsy and started moving around and are making more noise in the house.”
At 5:26 a.m. came the call: “Two down! Officer down!”
Barely a minute later, an officer radioed, “More shots.” Then another reported: “Rifle fire from the house. Anybody got eyes on?”
At 6:45 a.m., an officer radioed: “Shots fired from inside. … I don’t know where they came from.”
“We have a caller calling from inside saying the dad is down,” a dispatcher told officers at 6:55 a.m. “He is not breathing. He is in the bedroom. … He just shot himself in the head.”
Randy and Alicia McCullum, who live two houses from the scene, said they awoke to a gunshot at 5:12 a.m., followed by three more. They went to their window and saw police officers and a SWAT vehicle with an extended battering ram-type arm. Randy McCullum said he soon heard glass crashing and a barrage of gunfire. Flash grenades exploded in the driveway. The couple and their two teenage children huddled in a bathroom and prayed.
Around 7 a.m., as daylight emerged, they saw at least seven people — mostly children — leaving the house.
“Our hearts go out to them,” Randy McCullum said, touching his hands to his heart. “We are just so glad the mom and the kids are safe.”
The McCullums met the family a year ago and gave the man tickets to the Minnesota State Fair.
“They seem like really good kids,” Alicia McCullum said. “The mom seemed really good with the kids.”
Milo and Lynn Hartman, who live three houses away, said they heard pounding and “a lot of gunfire.” They then saw a rescue vehicle drive from the scene to an ambulance waiting near their home. Three people appeared unconscious as they were transferred into the ambulance, they said.
“We’ve lived here 39 years and never had any shootings like this,” Milo Hartman said. “My son says it’s time to move, but this happens everywhere. The world is crazy. Everyone has guns, way too many guns.”
Daniel Dix, who lives with his wife Jennifer two blocks away in Ville Du Parc, said they were notified by Dakota County at 5:50 a.m. and told to shelter in place. The order was lifted shortly before 11 a.m., and police soon began cordoning off the area with yellow crime scene tape.
It was the ninth time in barely 10 months that law enforcement officers have been killed or wounded by gunfire in Minnesota or an adjoining state.
At dusk, several hundred people gathered for a vigil at Burnsville City Hall. They crowded around police cars and an ambulance strewn with bouquets of flowers as the city manager and a police chaplain spoke about the need to support one another.
Dozens of police from across the metro and several cities across Minnesota joined the mourners.
A few families brought candles, but the vigil was mostly lit by the flickering blue and red lights atop the squad cars blocking the parking lot where mourners stood.
Gov. Tim Walz said the state stands ready to assist the three slain men’s families.
“That’s just not today and tomorrow, it’s for many years to come, and I think, for Minnesotans to recognize families that are shattered by something like this forever.”
The governor said the state Department of Public Safety is coordinating with local police to investigate the shootings. He is ordering flags to be flown at half-staff beginning Monday.
“Our police officers and our fire paramedics, they come to work every day, they do it willingly, they know that they might have to give up their life for their partners, for someone else,” said Schwartz, the Burnsville police chief. “They know they have to give up their life sometime, and they do it anyways.
“And you cannot understand it if you’re not in our profession. Every day we want them to go home to their families. Every day we pray that they go home to their families. And today that’s not happening.”
“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.
