MINNEAPOLIS
– A federal grand jury indicted a man Tuesday on charges that he fatally shot a prominent Minnesota state representative and her husband and seriously wounded a state senator and his wife while he was allegedly disguised as a police officer.
The indictment handed up lists murder, stalking and firearms charges against
Vance Boelter
. The murder counts in the deaths of
former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman
and her husband, Mark, could carry the
federal death penalty.
“This political assassination, the likes of which have never occurred here in the state of Minnesota, has shook our state at a foundational level,” acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said.
He said a decision on whether to seek the death penalty “will not come for several months” and will be up to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Minnesota abolished its state death penalty in 1911, but President Donald Trump’s administration says it intends to be aggressive in seeking capital punishment for eligible federal crimes.
Prosecutors
initially charged
Boelter with the same counts. But under federal court rules they needed a grand jury indictment to take the case to trial.
Prosecutors say Boelter, 57, who has lived in rural Sibley County south of Minneapolis, was driving a fake squad car, wearing a realistic rubber mask that covered his head and wearing tactical gear around 2 a.m. on June 14 when he went to the home of Sen. John Hoffman, a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin. He allegedly shot the senator nine times, and Yvette Hoffman eight times, but they survived.
Prosecutors allege he then stopped at the homes of two other lawmakers. One, in Maple Grove, wasn’t home while a police officer may have scared him off from the second, in New Hope. Boelter then allegedly went to the Hortmans’ home in nearby Brooklyn Park and killed both of them. Their dog
was so gravely injured
that he had to be euthanized.
Brooklyn Park police, who had been alerted to the shootings of the Hoffmans, arrived at the Hortman home around 3:30 a.m., moments before the gunman opened fire on the couple, the complaint said. Boelter allegedly fled and left behind his car, which contained notebooks listing
dozens of Democratic officials
as potential targets with
their home addresses,
as well as five guns and a large quantity of ammunition.
Law enforcement officers
finally captured
Boelter
about 40 hours later,
about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from his rural home in Green Isle, after what authorities called the largest search for a suspect in Minnesota history.
Sen. Hoffman is
out of the hospital
and is now at a rehabilitation facility, his family announced last week, adding he has a long road to recovery. Yvette Hoffman was released a few days after the attack. Former President Joe Biden
visited the senator
in the hospital when he was in town for the
Hortmans’ funeral.
Friends have described Boelter as an evangelical Christian with
politically conservative views
who
had been struggling
to find work. At a hearing July 3, Boelter said he was “looking forward to the facts about the 14th coming out.”
In an interview
published by the New York Post
on Saturday, Boelter insisted the shootings had nothing to do with his opposition to abortion or his support for Trump, but he declined to discuss why he allegedly killed the Hortmans and wounded the Hoffmans.
“You are fishing and I can’t talk about my case…I’ll say it didn’t involve either the Trump stuff or pro life,” Boelter wrote in a message to the newspaper via the jail’s messaging system.
Boelter also faces state murder and attempted murder charges in Hennepin County, but the federal case will go first.
Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris joined mourners at the Hortmans’ funeral June 28. Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, eulogized Melissa Hortman as “the
most consequential speaker
in Minnesota history.”
Hortman
led the House
from 2019 until January and was a driving force as Democrats passed an
ambitious list
of liberal priorities in 2023. She yielded the speakership to a Republican in a
power-sharing deal
after the November elections left the House tied, and she took the title speaker emerita.
