Minnesota authorities arrested Vance Boelter, the suspect in the assassination of Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and the failed assassination attempt of Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, on Sunday afternoon after a daylong manhunt.
Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley called it the “largest manhunt in state history” that required the response of multiple response teams and a state patrol helicopter.
“Where he was ultimately taken into custody was in a field,” Bruley said.
Who is Vance Boelter?
Boelter, 57, is married with five children and lives in Green Isle, a rural community southwest of Minneapolis. He was also renting a small room inside a shared home from a friend due to his late shifts working between two funeral services companies, at which he removed dead bodies from homes and nursing homes.
From 2023 to 2024, Boelter attended Des Moines Area Community College, taking classes in the school’s mortuary science program, a school spokesperson told the New York Times.
On Boelter’s LinkedIn, he is listed as the CEO of the Red Lion Group, with its operations being in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company’s website is no longer accessible, but an archived version stated its mission was to create “good jobs for local people.”
Boelter, a self-proclaimed Christian, has delivered sermons in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including one in which he criticized gay and transgender people. He became an ordained minister in 1993.
Boelter and his wife Jenny also ran a private security company known as Praetorian Guard Security Services, with Boelter listed as the director of security patrols and his wife the president. The company used Ford Explorers, the same vehicle model found at Hortman’s home.
Boelter worked as a general manager for a 7-Eleven gas station from 2016 to 2021. He has spent more than 20 years working in the food industry, working for companies such as Nestle, Del Monte Foods, and Johnsonville Sausage.
What are his political affiliations?
While Boelter’s motives remain unknown, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has declared that the shooting “appears to be a politically motivated assassination.”
Authorities first encountered Boelter outside of Hortman’s home, where they found inside his vehicle “No Kings” protest flyers, and a notebook with 70 listed names of lawmakers, all of whom were Democrats, as well as doctors, community and business leaders, and locations for Planned Parenthood.
Minnesota does not require voters to declare a party affiliation, and a recent report from 2020 showed Boelter was listed as having “no party preference.”
However, his childhood friend and roommate, David Carlson, shared that Boelter was adamantly opposed to abortion and voted for President Donald Trump.
“He would be offended if people called him a Democrat,” Carlson said. “Well he’s a Trump supporter. He voted for Trump.”
Boelter was appointed to serve on the Minnesota Governor’s Workforce by former Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton in 2016 and was reappointed by Walz in 2019. The board, which consists of 41 members, works to improve business development in the state. One of his victims, Hoffman, also served on the board at the same time as Boelter. Both attended a virtual meeting in 2022 centered on the job market in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It is unknown if the two knew of each other. One board member told the New York Times it would be easy for two members of the board not to know each other.
Recent downward spiral
Carlson shared that Boelter was experiencing financial and mental health challenges.
He “just gave up on life for some reason,” Carlson shared with the New York Times.
Boelter had paid Carlson his rent for four months in advance and had texted him that he might “be dead shortly.”
“I don’t want to say anything more and implicate you in any way because you guys don’t know anything about this,” Boelter texted to Carlson and the other men who lived in their house. “But I love you guys and I’m sorry for all the trouble this has caused.”