Friends say shooting suspect was deeply religious and conservative

NEW YORK (AP):

The man accused of assassinating the top Democrat in the Minnesota House held deeply religious and politically conservative views, telling a congregation in Africa two years ago that the US was in a “bad place” where most churches didn’t oppose abortion.

Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was captured late Sunday following a two-day manhunt authorities described as the largest in the state’s history. Boelter is accused of impersonating a police officer and gunning down former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home outside Minneapolis. Democratic Governor Tim Walz described the shooting as “a politically motivated assassination”.

Senator John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were shot earlier by the same gunman at their home nearby but survived.

Friends and former colleagues interviewed by AP described Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump. Records show Boelter registered to vote as a Republican while living in Oklahoma in 2004 before moving to Minnesota where voters don’t list party affiliation.

Near the scene at Hortman’s home, authorities say they found an SUV made to look like those used by law enforcement. Inside they found fliers for a local anti-Trump “No Kings” rally scheduled for Saturday and a notebook with names of other lawmakers. The list also included the names of abortion rights advocates and health care officials, according to two law enforcement officials who could not discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

Both Hortman and Hoffman were defenders of abortion rights at the state legislature.

Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said at a briefing on Sunday that Boelter is not believed to have made any public threats before the attacks. Evans asked the public not to speculate on a motivation for the attacks. “We often want easy answers for complex problems,” he told reporters. “Those answers will come as we complete the full picture of our investigation.”

Friends told the AP that they knew Boelter was religious and conservative, but that he didn’t talk about politics often and didn’t seem extreme.

“He was right-leaning politically but never fanatical, from what I saw, just strong beliefs,” said Paul Schroeder, who has known Boelter for years.

Boelter, who worked as a security contractor, gave a glimpse of his beliefs on abortion during a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2023. While there, Boelter served as an evangelical pastor, telling people he had first found Jesus as a teenager.

“The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong in many churches,” he said, according to an online recording of one sermon from February 2023. Still, in three lengthy sermons reviewed by the AP, he only mentioned abortion once, focusing more on his love of God and what he saw as the moral decay in his native country.

He appears to have hidden his more strident beliefs from his friends back home.

“He never talked to me about abortion,” Schroeder said. “It seemed to be just that he was a conservative Republican who naturally followed Trump.”

A married father with five children, Boelter and his wife own a sprawling 3,800-square-foot house on a large rural lot about an hour from downtown Minneapolis that the couple bought in 2023 for more than a half-million dollars.

He worked for decades in managerial roles for food and beverage manufacturers before seeking to reinvent himself in middle age, according to resumes and a video he posted online.

After getting an undergraduate degree in international relations in his 20s, Boelter went back to school and earned a master’s degree and then a doctorate in leadership studies in 2016 from Cardinal Stritch University, a private Catholic college in Wisconsin that has since shut down. While living in Wisconsin, records show Boelter and his wife Jenny founded a nonprofit corporation called Revoformation Ministries, listing themselves as the president and secretary.

After moving to Minnesota about a decade ago, Boelter volunteered for a position on a state workforce development board, first appointed by then-Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat, in 2016, and later by Democratic Governor Tim Walz. He served through 2023.

In that position, he may have crossed paths with one of his alleged victims. Hoffman served on the same board, though authorities said it was not immediately clear how much the two men may have interacted.