Last Saturday, around 7:30 am, as my car crept onto Highway 61 heading west, I heard a report on Minnesota Public Radio about a shelter-in-place order in a three-mile radius around the Edinburgh Golf Course in Brooklyn Park, MN. They reported that a shooter, who had injured at least four people in the early hours of the 14th, was still at large, dressed as a police officer. The search was ongoing, and no other details were available.
Every time I hear about one of these incidents, I assume the shootings are somehow related to gang activity or domestic violence. A jealous husband kills his wife and her boyfriend, and will soon give up the chase. In gang-related incidents, the shooter seems to vanish without a trace. I shook my head, sighed, “Here we go again,” and proceeded to my customer service job at the Cook County Home Center, which opened at 8.
Three of us were on the job, focusing on turning on the computers and the lights. As the morning routine continued, I tackled my least favorite part of the job: cleaning, purging, and replenishing the colorant in the paint mixing machine.
About an hour later, my co-worker Will stood looking at his phone and asked, “Did you see the news?” Checking the news is part of my early morning routine, so I replied yes. Then I asked, “What did I miss?”
So he called up the story on the computer for me to see. The shooter I’d heard about on the radio had assassinated Melissa Hortman, former DFL Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband Mark sometime around 3:30 a.m. Around 2 a.m., State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot and critically wounded in their home by a masked man who identified himself as a police officer, was wearing body armor, and drove a dark-colored SUV with emergency flashing lights that made it appear to be a police vehicle.
Alert law enforcement officials dispatched a squad car to the Hortmans’ home for a welfare check following the Hoffman incident. They arrived on the scene, confronted the assailant as he was leaving the house, and exchanged gunfire with him. The assassin ran back into the house, exited through the back door, and evaded police custody.
Reading that, I was utterly stunned. Stunned might not be the right word. I was gobsmacked, dumbfounded, shocked, dazed, and overwhelmed. After rattling off a string of curse words, I stepped back and tried to understand it. Political assassinations occur in Russia and other third-world countries. They don’t happen here.
The magnitude of these politically motivated shootings became clear to me a little later when a regular customer walked into the store. “Hey John (not his real name), how are you doing?” I could see he was down, and when he said not well, I probed a little deeper, thinking it might be health-related, like all of us old guys would conclude. No, he was, like me, completely thunderstruck by the assassinations.
I ran for election to the Minnesota House in 1992. Political tensions were high—they always were—but threats were rare and barely noticeable. I was a DFL candidate in a heavily Republican voting district. The worst harassment I received was periodic pictures of what I presumed to be dead fetuses stuffed in our mailbox. My three-part slogan on flyers and ads was “Pro-Business, Pro-People, and Pro-Choice,” but that third one turned off some neighbors. The second worst harassment occurred on election day when I was handed my hat at the ballot box.
The Bohunk and I received some harassing mail in the early ‘80s, before my politics and public profile had evolved. We were a couple in our 20s, building a life, focusing on the opportunities this country offered, and looking to share that life with family for a long time. In 1982, my father-in-law succumbed at age 50 to lung cancer that had metastasized and was consuming his brain. The Bohunk’s dad was a devoted if not dedicated Catholic. He never complained about his only daughter being betrothed to a Lutheran, although he may have harbored other reservations about me.
As was customary, Ken Pavek’s obituary listed his funeral, which would be held at Nativity of Mary Catholic Church on Lyndale Avenue, along with his surviving relatives, including Becky and me. Not more than a week after the funeral, The Bohunk and I began receiving missives in the mail about the sin of Lutherans marrying Catholics and how God’s wrath over our sin led to Ken’s cancer.
The letters were troubling, but soon stopped arriving, and life went on. These bold assassinations leave me with unsettling feelings about whether life will continue as we knew it before the Hortmans and their golden retriever were mercilessly gunned down.
