On Sunday night in Green isle, Minnesota, Wendy Thomas was talking on the phone with his father when he was someone in a field.
Thomas observed how the person reached a sewer and put on squatting, told ABC News KSTP affiliate.
“I thought, dad, it’s someone,” he told The Outlet. “He said: ‘Hang and call someone.'”
Moments later, Thomas was marking a police member, he said, and telling them about the man he had seen for the sewer. What followed was the arrest of a suspect, Vance Boelter, 57, whom the local and federal police had been looking for approximately 43 hours.
Vance Boelter, 57, the suspect accused of killing a legislator from Minnesota and shooting another, sits in a federal court while facing positions of murder in the deaths of shooting of Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, June 16, 2025 in this sketch of the court.
Cedric Hohnstadt/Reuters
It is suspected that Boelter appeared in court on Monday, shot and kills a legislator from Minnesota and her husband, as well as shooting and hurting a second legislator and his wife.
Boelter allegedly appeared on its doors in the middle of the night that he passed a police officer and with a realistic -looking mask, authorities said, and pointed out that two other legislators were saved the night of the shootings.
He “stalked his victims as a prey” and “shot them in cold blood,” said the United States lawyer for the Minnesota Joseph District Joseph Thompson at a press conference while describing the “chilling” details.
It faces federal positions that include charges of harassment and firearms and state positions, including first degree murders, authorities said.
Vance Boelter, 57, was arrested near his farm in Green isle, Minnesota.
Ramsey County Sheriff Office
Boelter was arrested Sunday night near his farm in Green isle shortly after Thomas saw him. Boelter was armed when he was arrested in a rural area on Sunday night, authorities said, but was arrested without incident.
Boelter supposedly had firearms and a list of 45 elected officials in notebooks in his car, said Thompson.
The police have not yet described a potential motive for the shooting. But the senator of the state of Minnesota, Scott Dribble, who worked with Hortman, told ABC News on Monday that he was “very concerned about the nature of the rhetoric that is happening with politics, especially among right -wing extremists.”
Dribble pointed out what he saw as a change in recent years so that “those at the highest levels get involved in the rhetoric of dehumanization, politicize government instruments, politicize our military and really ask for a violent response instead of really having vigorous political debates.”
This reserve photo provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s office shows Vance Boelter in Green isle, Minnesota, on June 16, 2025.
Hennepin County Sheriff Office
Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan de Minnesota, meanwhile, asked “each elected official of each strip and party has to reject the temperature.” Elected representatives and government employees should be showing their “humanity” in difficult times and arriving through the hall, Flanagan told ABC News on Monday.
“Our community, our families, you know, taking care of each other, taking a step forward to each other. And that must continue to be the message during this time of divisive rhetoric,” he said.
Governor Tim Walz echoed the feeling on Monday.
“The way our nation progresses is not through hatred. It is not through violence,” Walz said in a statement published on social networks. “It is through humility, grace and compassion.”
ABC News’ Emily Shapiro, Pierre Thomas, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, Alexander Mallin and Brittany Shepherd contributed to this report.
