Star Tribune
Three Burnsville first responders join toll of domestic violence
They came to help.
Police and paramedics. The first responders of Burnsville. The people who answer the call in the middle of the night about a man with a gun, barricaded in a house full of children.
Officers Paul Elmstrand and Matthew Ruge. Firefighter Adam Finseth. They came to help, and it cost them everything.
After an hourslong standoff early Sunday, gunfire erupted from the house in Burnsville, killing Elmstrand and Ruge, who were both 27. Finseth, a 40-year-old Fire Department paramedic, was killed while trying to help the downed officers. A third officer was shot and injured.
They are the second, third and fourth Minnesotans killed by domestic violence this year. The first was Sandra Wilson Goertz, 81, of Lake Benton, victim of an apparent murder-suicide on Jan. 4.
We lose so many of our neighbors to domestic violence. Their names and stories blur and fade, replaced by the next horror story and the next.
On Feb. 1, Violence Free Minnesota reminded us of the 39 lives lost to intimate partner violence last year. It was the highest death toll the group had ever recorded in a single year.
They reminded us of the bright life and big smile of Kyla O’Neal, who was nine months pregnant when she was gunned down in the parking lot at work in January 2023 by her ex-fiancé. Her baby son, Messiah O’Neal, was delivered by cesarean but died nine days later.
Remember Madeline Kingsbury, 26, of Winona, strangled to death in front of her children. It took 10 weeks to discover where her killer hid her body. Remember Don-Shay Hardy, 38, of St. Paul, who was styling her child’s hair in the bathroom when her husband burst in with a gun.
Betty Jo Bowman, 32, of Rochester, whose husband, a doctor, stands accused of her murder by poison. Manijeh Starren, 33, killed and dismembered in her St. Paul apartment. Her boyfriend, the chief suspect, has also been linked to another woman’s disappearance. Savannah Ryan Williams, 38, was gunned down on a Minneapolis sidewalk.
They remembered the helpers. The ones who stepped between an abuser and victim and paid the price.
Antonio Moore,37, stabbed to death last May while protecting his sister from an abusive ex.
Pope County Sheriff’s Deputy Joshua Owen, 44, shot and killed last April while responding to a domestic disturbance call in Cyrus. Two other officers were shot and injured.
In the past decade, domestic violence has taken the lives of at least 250 Minnesotans — including four members of law enforcement who were responding to calls for help, said Joe Shannon, communications program manager for Violence Free Minnesota. The group remembers them, along with all the others who tried to intervene, as well as bystanders like Marquisha “Kiki” Wiley, who was killed when a domestic violence dispute erupted into a mass shooting in a St. Paul bar in 2021.
“We believe that it’s critical to include bystanders, because without that domestic violence present, these people would still be alive,” Shannon said.
It’s a reminder of the toll domestic violence takes on the whole community. Sunday’s tragedy shattered three families forever. It caused incalculable trauma to the woman and seven young children who were trapped in the house during the standoff and to the officer still recovering from his wounds. It broke Burnsville’s heart.
“I think about the children. The neighbors, locked down in their homes,” Shannon said. “Domestic violence is not just an issue between people in the relationship. It extends so far past that.”
If you’re in danger from an intimate partner, or trying to help someone else, you can call Minnesota’s Day One Hotline, toll-free at 866-223-1111 or text 612-399-9995.
“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.
