The victim told police on Sept. 10 that Shelton had flirted with her during work shifts and scheduled her hours to align with when he managed the store. She said they had sexually charged late-night conversations.

The victim told police that Shelton pushed himself against her one day as she was cleaning coffee pots in a back room of the grocery store. She said Shelton also inappropriately touched her in his office and in her car.

The sexual assaults stopped when Shelton’s significant other learned about the relationship in 2021 and started texting the victim. The victim said she quit her job at this point, and did not hear from Shelton until Aug. 20 this year, two days before his arrest. In text messages reviewed by police, Shelton apologized and said he missed their friendship.

Police said Shelton admitted to the three assaults.

They had arrested Shelton on Aug. 22 after receiving word that he had been exchanging explicit messages with a different teenage cashier.

The previous victim told police that Shelton, her supervisor since she started working at the Market as a 14-year-old in 2022, had sexually assaulted her inside his office on the second floor of the store.

Baker was convicted of both counts. His lawyers appealed.

A Minnesota appeals court sided with the district court, writing that Baker “was not content with simply neutralizing Anderson’s threat, but was motivated by vengeance.”

That argument stemmed from statements made by Baker to police that the victims were running away when he shot at them and phone calls Baker made in prison where he told his girlfriend he was “mad as hell” the other robbery suspect got away when he started shooting.

The appeals court opinion, written by Judge Michael Kirk, argued, “Baker had not demonstrated the absence of a reasonable possibility of retreat, equally support the conclusion that his use of deadly force was unreasonable.” Kirk wrote that “no reasonable jury” would find that Baker’s use of force was justifiable so the district court did not “abuse its discretion” by failing to instruct the jury on the law of self-defense and defense of others.

The Minnesota Supreme Court disagreed.

The crux of Hudson’s opinion focuses on Baker’s right to have self-defense and defense of others considered by the jury at closing arguments, not whether Baker’s argument would overturn the guilty verdict.

Election officials in all 87 counties in Minnesota have begun the process of checking results for accuracy. Required by law, officials will manually count ballots of randomly selected precincts and compare results with those tabulated by electronic voting machines.

In Hennepin County, that included checking results in 12 precincts chosen in a lottery, and verifying the results of three races in each. In total, 30 election judges with observers and the public watching from across the table will comb through 70,314 ballots to ensure vote totals match up, said Ginny Gelms, head of Hennepin County Elections.

The process started Monday morning and may take two days, Gelms said.

“Today is a reminder that the 2024 election process is not over yet,” Simon said. “The mandatory reviews are a critical safeguard to ensure accuracy.”

Discrepancies in vote totals are rare, officials said. In that case, additional precincts in the count would be audited, Gelms said.