The image caught on the doorbell video was nightmarish: a stranger at the front door, disguised in a ghastly mask. By the time it entered the public domain, the man in the image was seconds away from murdering the occupants of the house, Minnesota state congresswoman and speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
It was the early hours of Saturday morning. By then, the man, later named as 57-year-old Vance Boelter, had already called to the house of another state politician, John Hoffman, and his wife Yvette, both of whom he shot repeatedly. Miraculously, both have survived.
A sergeant from the nearby Brooklyn Park precinct who had helped respond to the emergency call to the Hoffmans immediately instructed, with what was described as “very intuitive” instinct, a squad car to check on the Hortmans’ home. Police arrived to find Boelter, and fired at him. He entered the Hortmans’ home, shot them and escaped.
By Saturday morning, the biggest manhunt in the history of Minnesota was under way and on Sunday night, Boelter was ferreted out. By then, an extensive list of other intended victims had been found in his car. One of the names was that of Dean Phillips, the former congressman and US presidential candidate who ran against Joe Biden in the Democratic primary election last year.
“Sadly, I am used to it,” Phillips responded when asked how he felt to discover his name was among Boelter’s targets.
“Everyone working in public office, we are accustomed to it,” he continued, noting that during his presidential campaign, the biggest budget expense was security.
The killings marked another bleak episode in US politics and as the premeditated violence visited on the Hortman family dominated the weekend headlines, other victims of national political violence were among those who paid tribute.
Steve Scalise, the Republican House majority leader shot while playing baseball in 2017, described the killings as “horrible news” in a social media post. “There can be no tolerance of political violence and it must be stopped. Join me in praying for their families.”
Nancy Pelosi, the former Democrat House speaker, stated that “Paul and I are heartbroken.” In 2022, Paul Pelosi was attacked and seriously wounded by an intruder in their home, who bludgeoned him with a hammer.
Gabby Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who survived being shot in the head in 2011, said that she was “horrified and heartbroken”.
All of these were spontaneous responses from politicians from both parties to a shocking crime. But the response of the most high-profile target of recent political violence struck a different tone on Tuesday. US president Donald Trump was on his way back from the G7 summit in Canada late on Monday night when he was asked if he had spoken to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, since the shootings.
“Why would I call him? He appointed this guy to a position,” he said, alluding to the fact that Boelter had been reappointed to a non-partisan advisory board.
“I could call and say: ‘Hi, how you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So I could be nice and call, but why waste time?”
Trump’s animus towards Walz was nothing new and reflected the bitter exchanges of last summer’s presidential election when the Minnesotan, sprung as a running-mate by Kamala Harris, memorably referred to the Trump-Vance policies as “kinda weird”.
The line was the closest the Democrats came to knocking the Trump campaign out of stride. By then, Trump had already survived, by millimetres, an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and was the target of a foiled shooting plot, at his golf club in Mar-a-Lago later in the year.
In the immediate aftermath of the Minnesota killings, Trump issued a statement to confirm he had been “briefed on the terrible shooting” and warned that “such horrific violence would not be tolerated”. But expressing condolences to the state’s governor proved a step too far for the president. It is unknown whether he has privately contacted the bereaved family.
The politicisation of the killings had begun even as the manhunt gripped the state. Utah Republican senator Mike Lee posted two inexplicably poorly judged messages to his X account on the Sunday. One read: “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” The other showed a still image of the masked Boelter at the Hortman’s porch beneath the caption “Nightmare on Waltz Street”.
The messages were condemned by Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar. “I condemned what he did and I will speak to him when I return and what I will tell him is that this isn’t funny, what happened here,” she said in an MSNBC interview.
“This was an incredible woman, her husband, her two kids – yesterday on Father’s Day, there was no Father’s Day for them. They lost both their parents.”
A photograph of senator Tina Smith, also a Minnesota Democrat, rebuking Lee in the Capitol on Monday was widely circulated: Smith later recalled telling her colleague that his messages had caused immense pain to thousands of Minnesotans.
“I want you to know how painful that was for me and for thousands and thousands of Minnesotans, and you have a responsibility to think about the impact of your words,” she recounted telling Lee.
Meanwhile, the Salt Lake Tribune obtained a copy of a blistering letter that Smith’s deputy chief of staff sent to senator Lee’s office.
“The decision of the office of Senator Mike Lee was not to publicly condemn the violence or to express condolences to her shattered children – it was to intimate that Melissa and Mark somehow deserved this? By making jokes? Did you have any consideration for the survivors in her family? For the Hoffmans in the hospital? For their families? You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats. Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet[s]? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?”
In the hours and days since the shooting, prominent far-right conspiracy theories predictably spread falsehoods linking the killings to Democratic policies, some going so far as to link Walz with the shootings. That campaign was designed to obscure an early interview with a man described as Boelter’s roommate who said that the suspect was a Trump supporter.
During the nationwide No Kings protests which overshadowed the 250th anniversary army parade in Washington on Saturday, it was noted that several placards read “86 47″, interpreted as a numerically coded threat against the president.
All the while, a picture began to emerge of Boelter as a deeply religious conservative and father of five who decided to make his anti-abortion views the reason behind the murders of which he now stands accused.
“It appears he used the abortion question,” Dean Phillips agreed.
“I believe what this is really about is yet another example of an American in despair whose life didn’t turn out the way he wanted, economically challenged, his professional pursuits failed and sadly these people feel that they have to attract attention somehow and they choose the most atrocious way to do it.
“I think he conveniently chose this issue and he clearly chose Democrats. And it’s just repulsive. But it could have been Republicans. It doesn’t matter – his politics, his colour, race or religion. What matters is that we continue to express horror and shock and don’t do much about it.”
