The Minnesota Shootings Were Shocking. Then the Details Really Started Coming Out.

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Early Saturday morning, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman was murdered in her home alongside her husband, Mark. Minutes later the same gunman, who was dressed as a police officer, opened fire at a second address and left state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, seriously injured. The attacker vanished, triggering a 48-hour manhunt and a torrent of online guesswork about motives, manifestos, and party affiliation.

Inside the Minnesota Star Tribune newsroom, the weekend turned into an all-hands sprint. The reporter who ultimately co-wrote Monday's front-page piece wasn't even on duty. Christopher Vondracek, a DC correspondent who has covered everything from lawsuits over prairie dogs to Capitol Hill budget shouting matches, was celebrating Father's Day with his family when he took the story on. The news only got more chaotic in the hours that followed. I asked him about everything he saw unfold. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Aymann Ismail: Where were you when this story broke?

Christopher Vondracek: I was our agriculture reporter back in Minnesota up until a few months ago. My wife and I recently moved out to DC, where I now cover the federal government. It was about 8 in the morning on Saturday, East Coast time, and I was going to get bagels. A sports reporter who was attending a family softball event in the suburbs reported to folks in the newsroom-wide Slack channel that he saw armored vehicles and a SWAT tactical team nearby. And it became immediately apparent that this was linked to a legislator that was shot.

As news broke, did you find it difficult to distinguish truth from rumor? I did.

Immediately, we started getting stuff coming in, but none of it was verified. We had people watching social media. I messaged DNC Chair Ken Martin and Gov. [Tim] Walz, whose comms person had just spoken at the Center for American Progress on Friday, so I had already been back and forth with his staff earlier. That's how we discovered that Rep. Hortman had been assassinated, and Sen. Hoffman was in the hospital undergoing surgeries, but there was a chance he might make it. And that was, gosh, like 10 am

They had set up a headquarters in St. Paul for journalists to receive information. One of our political reporters, who wrote the main story that day, still had a tuxedo on. He's getting married, and left his tux fitting to do his job once it was apparent there had been a shooting that involved a lawmaker. We had multiple stories set up that day. At one point, I was like, “Can I use the language of political assassination?” Like, Whoa, what needs to be in place for us to call it that? We had agreed on that language after the governor used it.

I remember early on there was a frenzy for finding out information about the shooter, assigning to them either a Democrat or Republican label. At one point, I read that the shooting was related to the “No Kings” rallies staged across the nation. It was pointed out that the shooter was appointed to a state board by Walz in 2019 . How does all of that complicate your job?

What's weird for me is that I don't want to call it misinformation. Yes, the suspect was on a nonpartisan workforce industry 16-member board, first appointed by then–Gov. Mark Dayton. That's accurate. But there was other stuff, too. Rep. Hortman, who was then minority leader, voted with Republicans and Walz to strip health care for undocumented people to get the budget bill passed. That was a big caucus-splitting vote for Rep. Hortman. A Republican I know messaged me what I had been seeing online, pointing to that vote as a potential left-wing activist motivation.

As a journalist, you don't want to dismiss any idea outright, even if it seems far-fetched. But I'm grateful to have a whole team of reporters who are professionals that can point to the inconsistencies in those types of rumors. And as more information came out, like the names of many other progressives who were on the suspect's list of targets, it became apparent that that rumored motivation was not right. There was maybe 90 minutes there where there was some fluidity on that front, where we tried to understand what this workforce board was that the suspect was on. But now, as we've seen, the dude was a big supporter of President Trump, listening to Infowars.

Then in his car, he had these “No King” fliers, right? What the hell does that mean? Did he just run into a Kinko's and print these out? And we've skipped over the weird stuff about him being disguised as a policeman and wearing a mask. It's just breathtaking.

I covered Gov. Walz on his pheasant hunt last fall when he was a vice presidential candidate. I remember not getting any Wi-Fi in the field we were in as I and 20 other journalists followed him around. After leaving the field and getting Wi-Fi, I saw all this weird misinformation from across the world, all the way in England, alleging that Walz couldn't take the shells out of a shotgun. In the three hours we were out there, for 10 seconds while he was talking to the press standing there, his gun jams a little bit. Is that misinformation? Or is it selective sharing of snippets of a broader whole that get weaponized by people online?

What was the most remarkable bit of information that you discovered this weekend?

By the end of the day on Saturday, the police confirmed that they were looking for a suspect named Vance Boelter. It came out that police stopped Boelter's wife and three relatives at a gas station. They appeared to be on a very popular highway, 169, near this big lake called Mille Lacs where a lot of folks go. Apparently, the sheriff got word from Hennepin County, and a reporter did interviews and found out they had gotten gas-station pizza and soda pops and then sat out in lawn chairs for like five hours at this gas station, doing this interview. And the way they phrased it was that they were questioning her. I'm sure they're also trying to find out what she knew and what she didn't know.

Finding out who Boelter is was also weird. We found out he has this evangelical fervor and had gone on mission trips to Africa and had made anti-trans, homophobic commentary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His summary looked really funky, like something cooked up by AI He also had many a half-cooked business plan to be a security professional and had some vehicles that looked like they were law enforcement vehicles; I wasn't on the Boelter part of this story, but everything from working at a mortuary to managing a gas station. He had a farm down in Green Isle, where he was from, a town of like 200 people. It was where he was found Sunday night.

When did you realize this story was going to go national?

I thought when I heard that Melissa Hortman was dead. She's like the Nancy Pelosi of Minnesota. Even before that, when we heard that there were two houses. When we heard it was just one home, well, maybe that's some random thing. When I heard it was two of them, I thought OK, it's “No Kings” day. There's a military parade down the street here in DC We had Sen. Alex Padilla wrestled to the ground out in California. And I was in the Capitol a couple days ago when a shouting match broke out. I think, collectively, atmospherically, I think that's when it crystallized for me, when I heard that there was a second, and then particularly understood how international this would be when I heard that Melissa had died.

The police disguise thing—in my copy, I remember almost bumping my nose into that detail on my first or second draft. Like, “Oh right. I have to mention that detail too.” What it meant for law enforcement to have somebody impersonating them. It's strange, but in this context, it almost felt like a secondary detail.

There were 70 targets? Have you seen the hit list?

We're still trying to get the current list. A bunch of Democrats are on it. A bunch of health care facilities that provide abortion care are on there. My cousin's hospital in Nebraska, according to one version of the list I've seen, is also on it. It's a notebook. The cops last night were like, “We don't begrudge you for saying 'manifesto.' But this is a notebook with names and addresses.” And what's super creepy is that there were two legislators who I initially texted to be like, “Hey, can you talk to me about Melissa?” Both of those legislators are on that list. One didn't respond until eight hours later. She was like, “I just got out of hiding.”

What happened when the alleged shooter was apprehended?

By 9 pm Eastern, the story needed to be off the desk. I stayed on for another hour even though I was told by my editor I was finished. But I felt a sense of incompleteness, wondering if they would find him. We were going to have thousands of copies of physical paper going to go out tomorrow. If they find him, we'll have it updated on the website. But every little gas station in Minnesota is going to have old news on the front. I had been up for two days. We have a 4-month-old and a 3-year-old, so I've not been sleeping well. By 10 pm Eastern, I'm downstairs, I'm reading, I have my computer open still. My editor sends me a good-night note. I see some information about cops scrambling, but an editor says it's a false alarm and not to worry about it. So I nod out and then wake up around 11:30 pm Eastern to babies crying and everything had happened. Everything goddamn happened. They found him in a field.