Star Tribune
Burnsville police officer Matthew Ruge wanted to ‘make a difference in this world’
Matthew Ruge, the Burnsville police officer killed Sunday during a domestic standoff, grew up in the unincorporated township of Reads Landing, a riverfront community north of Wabasha. It is one of those places where everyone knows everyone else.
“Every teacher liked him,” said Jon Auge, who taught Ruge in seventh and eighth grade. He recalled a sweet, quiet child who earned good grades, played basketball and never needed to be corrected in class.
Ruge, 27, his fellow officer Paul Elmstrand and firefighter-paramedic Adam Finseth were fatally shot while responding to a domestic violence incident in a Burnsville home. Ruge graduated from Wabasha-Kellogg High School in 2015. Like Elmstrand, who was also 27, friends recalled that Ruge told them early on he wanted to be a police officer.
“You just knew that whatever he did in life he was gonna be good at,” said Auge, noting that Ruge went out of his way to greet him long after Ruge was no longer his student.
Wabasha-Kellogg High School English teacher Cris Medina said Ruge was a “very positive” student who “was a great role model for his peers and was always respectful.”
As a boy, Matthew and his sister, Hannah, would stop by neighbor Robin Gwaltney’s house to swim in the pool; her father, Wayne, became a sort of neighborhood grandfather to the kids, she said.
“My parents would have been in their late 60s and just got the biggest kick out of those kids,” said Gwaltney. “Our house had an inground pool, but my mom and dad, and especially my dad, would take them over and sit with them for hours on end while their mom worked. They were like pseudo grandchildren to my parents,” she said.
Gwaltney’s mother died in late 2022. When her father fell ill last spring, Matthew drove down to Reads Landing to visit with him for three hours. “He had the nicest visit with my dad, and my dad died two days later,” said Gwaltney.
“I was so impressed with Matt and how respectful and caring he was,” she said. “Most kids go through a bratty stage; he did not. He was always the kid who, if he saw my dad out in the yard, he would offer to go out and help. I wasn’t at all surprised that this kid grew up and decided to become a police officer.”
Longtime friend Ty Gaedtke said Ruge was committed to a career in law enforcement.
“As far back as I can remember, Matt had wanted to be a police officer,” Gaedtke wrote on Facebook. “He had always felt like it was a job where he could really make a difference in this world.”
“Even when we had questioned him on the danger and social scrutiny of the job, he doubled down. That is a testament to the man that Matt was. Selfless and courageous. Kind and loyal,” Gaedtke wrote.
Gaedtke said he was in disbelief when he learned of Ruge’s death. Ruge had planned to come visit him next weekend, Gaedtke said.
Ruge joined the Burnsville Police Department in April of 2020. He was on the crisis negotiations team and was a physical evidence officer.
In 2018, he earned his bachelor’s degree in law enforcement at Minnesota State University, Mankato, home of the Mavericks. On Monday, the university’s president, Edward S. Inch, issued a statement saying the school community was grieving Ruge’s death along with the shooting in the same incident of Burnsville Police Sgt. Adam Medlicott, who graduated from the university in 2007. Medlicott was treated at Hennepin County Medical Center for his injuries and released.
“My deepest sympathies and heartfelt condolences go to the families and friends of those injured and killed and to all those in our community who are affected and feel a deep sense of loss,” Inch wrote. “In every corner of the world, Mavericks are doing incredible and sometimes dangerous work. On days like these, we must remember that even in dark times, our community is strong and resilient. As an academic community, we must continue to use dialogue, engagement, and advocacy to find opportunities to reduce violence.”
The Wabasha-Kellogg superintendent held a moment of silence at the high school Tuesday morning to honor Ruge. And later in the day, Auge played a TV news clip for his students.
“Those of us adults that know Matt, it shook us a lot,” Auge said.
A candlelight vigil will be held for Ruge at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday under the bridge at Heritage Park in Wabasha.
Staff writer Liz Sawyer contributed to this report.
“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.
