Star Tribune
Minnesota Supreme Court upholds Buffalo clinic mass shooter’s convictions, including murder
The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday denied the appeal of a man who committed a mass shooting inside Buffalo’s Allina Health Clinic two years ago, killing a medical assistant and wounding four staffers in a brazen attack that involved gunfire and pipe bombs.
Gregory Paul Ulrich, 70, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after a Wright County jury convicted him in 2022 of all 11 felony charges, including the premediated first-degree murder of Lindsay Overbay, 37. Ulrich argued that extensive media coverage made a fair trial impossible and that Wright County District Court abused its discretion by denying his request to strike a juror who read about the shooting and Overbay’s slaying.
But the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously upheld Ulrich’s convictions in a ruling Wednesday, two weeks after the two-year anniversary of the mass shooting on Feb. 9, 2021.
In the 21-page ruling written by Justice G. Barry Anderson, the high court found that the district court allowed Ulrich to renew his request to change venues, which he did not do. Because of this, Ulrich forfeited his appellate review of the issue after the district court concluded “the horrific nature of the events and widespread reporting throughout Minnesota of those events made a change of venue likely ineffective.”
Justices also ruled that Ulrich’s defense attorneys failed to use a peremptory challenge to remove the juror in question. The Supreme Court found that the juror did not express bias when asked at length whether he could set aside what he read in the news. The juror said that his mother-in-law was a nurse at the hospital where Overbay died. While he said it wouldn’t be easy, the juror said he would keep an open mind.
Ulrich testified at trial in his own defense, saying that he didn’t intend to kill anyone. In appeal, he argued there was insufficient evidence to support premediated first-degree murder.
But Anderson wrote that “it is unreasonable to conclude that Ulrich did not premeditate the murders and intend to kill the victims” when considering the circumstances and facts of the case.
Less than two months before the shooting, Ulrich recorded cell phone videos with statements about how persons denied oxycodone should “kill as many nurses as you can.”
Ulrich had been in severe pain for more than four years after surgery on his spine and tailbone and grew angry that he couldn’t get narcotic drugs to relieve his pain. Authorities suspected him of abusing opioids and cut him off.
He traveled to the clinic, armed with a 9-milimeter handgun, ammunition, and four pipe bombs.
On the witness stand, Ulrich said he planned on property damage by blowing up some bombs and shooting victims in the buttocks. But upon entering the clinic, he “wanted to sensationalize more” to send a louder message and “get people’s attention,” he testified.
Anderson said Ulrich shot several victims multiple times and at close range. Despite Ulrich arguing in his appeal that he attempted to render aid because he called 911, Anderson ruled that Ulrich set off three bombs after placing that call.
“…[T]he call to 911 was only after he had attempted to lure more victims into a trap by pretending that he needed help,” Anderson wrote.
Also wounded in the attack were clinic workers Sherry Curtis, Antonya Fransen-Pruden, Jennifer Gibson, and Tamara Schaufler.
Wright County Attorney Brian Lutes said in a statement Wednesday that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruling “ensures that Ulrich will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
“I extend my thoughts and prayers to the family and friends of Lindsay Overbay, the other shooting victims, and all the medical providers and patients at the clinic on February 9, 2021, who were impacted by this horrific act of violence. I thank my law enforcement partners and paramedics who entered the clinic with extreme courage to arrest Ulrich and render care to the shooting victims. Lives were saved because of the bravery of law enforcement and paramedics.”
“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.
