Star Tribune
Two Minneapolis police officers earn Medal of Valor for daring water rescue of 4-year-old boy
The radio squawked signaling a priority one call and Minneapolis police Sgt. Jeremy Depies raced toward Bryn Mawr Meadows Park, where a 4-year-old boy had fallen through the ice.
He and two colleagues frantically scanned the reservoir searching for signs of the child. Suddenly, they spotted his navy snowpants bobbing above the surface.
Without hesitation, Officer Ashley Bergersen threw off her jacket and crashed through the frozen pond alongside Depies, wading in chest-deep water to reach little Eli Steinbach. She carried his limp body out to her partner, who helped perform chest compressions for several minutes until paramedics arrived.
“It was instinct‚” Bergersen said of the rescue last November. “I just thought that if it was my son, I sure hope somebody would go in and save them.”
Their heroic actions earned both Fourth Precinct officers a Medal of Valor, the department’s highest honor, during its annual award ceremony at the Ukrainian Cultural Center on Tuesday night. Relatives beamed as Chief Brian O’Hara placed the awards around their necks, two among several dozen recognized for going above and beyond the call of duty.
Body camera footage of the incident — released with permission from Eli’s mother — offers a rare glimpse into one of the most traumatic calls officers can receive: an unresponsive child.
On Sunday, Nov. 26, three days after Thanksgiving, Sgt. Depies was on routine patrol with a civilian ridealong in north Minneapolis when the 911 call came through.
Within seconds, Depies arrived to find Eli’s older sister waiting in her front yard.
“Where is he?” Depies repeatedly asked. The girl didn’t know. Her mother came outside to direct officers toward an unfenced drainage pond, where she thinks Eli fell through after wandering outside.
Depies ran to the waters’ edge, meeting up with Bergersen and Officer Christopher Kleven, a recent transfer from the Brooklyn Center police department still in training. They soon found Eli, floating facedown, barely visible beyond his snowpants.
Bergersen lugged him to shore, where she and Kleven took turns performing CPR on the sidewalk as his mother wailed in the background. They pounded on his back in a desperate attempt to get water out of his lungs, while Depies radioed for an ambulance.
“Come on, bud!” Bergersen pleaded, her voice breaking. “Don’t die on us, OK! You can do it.”
When paramedics arrived, Bergersen climbed in the rig and rode to the hospital.
“I wasn’t letting Eli out of my sight,” she recalled in an interview. “So when I put him on that gurney, I knew I was gonna be there for the long haul. I was gonna be with him until they told me to go home.”
During the next few excruciating hours, Bergersen questioned whether she could keep doing the job if another child died before her eyes. In 2021, she was among the first officers to respond after a stray bullet struck 9-year-old Trinity Ottoson-Smith in the head while jumping on a trampoline. From the back of her squad car, Bergersen willed her to live. Trinity died 12 days later at the hospital.
Bergersen prayed for a better outcome this time. After nearly a week in a medically induced coma, Eli regained consciousness. His mother texted Bergersen a picture of him giving a thumbs up.
A giant weight lifted off the officers’ backs that day.
“This isn’t anything that either one of us has been trained to do,” Depies said of the water rescue, for which Kleven also received a Lifesaving award. “But in that moment it didn’t matter. …We improvised.”
Eli suffered a hypoxic brain injury, which caused some hearing loss, according to the GoFundMe page set up by the family. But the fun-loving child got a second chance at life.
Health insurer UCare has reached an agreement with HealthPartners clinics, which will allow thousands of patients to continue seeing the same doctors without switching health plans next year.
The two companies announced the agreement Friday evening. The terms are effective immediately.
“As mission-driven organizations, UCare and HealthPartners share a commitment to improving health outcomes for our community, and the organizations’ ongoing collaboration reflects that shared goal,” a joint statement said.
The clinics had been out of network for several years, but UCare had waived rules that would have blocked patients from making appointments. UCare said it would start enforcing the network rules Jan. 1.
Star Tribune
Man charged in Brooklyn Park homicide had connection to 2022 Mall of America fatal shooting
A 19-year-old Coon Rapids man, who played a role in a 2022 fatal shooting at the Mall of America, is facing murder charges in connection with an apparent targeted shooting earlier this month in Brooklyn Park.
Citing witnesses, surveillance footage and cell phone data, prosecutors say that Marquan D. Tucker waited in a parking lot Dec. 7 before opening fire on two people when they exited a business in the 8000 block of Brooklyn Boulevard.
The two victims returned fire, though one was wounded and the other, Ramone R. Blue, 23, of Stewartville, Minn., was killed. The complaint, filed Friday, offers no motive for the shooting.
The shooting happened about seven months after Tucker was discharged from court monitoring related to the 2022 fatal shooting of 19-year-old Johntae Hudson in a department store at the Mall of America, according to court records.
Tucker was charged with third-degree riot in the case and was adjudicated as delinquent, or found guilty, court records said. He was one of three teens who confronted or chased Hudson into the store where the shooting happened. The two teens who carried guns received long prison sentences.
Tucker was being held Friday at the Hennepin County jail. It wasn’t clear if he yet had an attorney.
According to the criminal complaint:
Surveillance video shows a black BMW pull into the parking lot in Brooklyn Park around 1:30 p.m. on Dec. 7. As the two victims exit a business, a man leaves the passenger seat of the BMW, hides behind another car and fires about 16 shots. The gunman then flees in the BMW.
Talon Metals, the company proposing an underground nickel mine near Tamarack, Minn., has backed away from a novel plan that would have used a subway-digging machine to carve an underground loop to reach the ore.
Instead, Talon, which hopes to one day supply the materials for Tesla’s electric vehicle batteries, will dig a straight path down to those minerals. The revised environmental assessment worksheet filed Dec. 12 incorporated public, state and tribal feedback, said Jessica Johnson, the vice president of external affairs for Talon.
“We’re reducing the amount of ground disturbance and the amount of rock that we need to handle and manage,” Johnson said.
By no longer using a tunnel boring machine, Talon has sidestepped early concerns from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources about waste rock, potential contamination of water and an untested technology for mining. But building a single, diagonal shaft underground also means that Talon will be blasting rock closer to the surface, at 100 feet below as opposed to 300 feet below.
Talon is still studying how many sulfides will be in the waste rock between the surface and the nickel it is seeking, the company said in filings. Sulfide minerals that can interact with air and water to create acid mine drainage, or release sulfates that are toxic to wild rice.
The company also abandoned a proposal to pile waste rock outside on top of liners, and now says it will store excess rock inside a central building — or ship it along with ore to a processing plant it intends to build in North Dakota.
Several parts of the facility have been moved inside this building, and the central mine shaft will also reach the surface indoors. Johnson described the concept as a “mine in a box.”
But the new design also introduces new questions, said Paula Maccabee of the environmental group WaterLegacy. She questioned how Talon would be able to supply enough fresh air for workers in the mine when the main opening is enclosed. Previously, the loop design had two openings at the surface of the ground.
