State Senator Ann Rest, a Democrat from the Minneapolis suburbs, said she was told that the suspect accused of shooting two other lawmakers had been “parked near my home early Saturday morning.” She credited police officers who were proactively checking on her safety with sparing her from an attack.
“I am so grateful for the heroic work of the New Hope Police Department and its officers,” Ms. Rest said in a statement. “Their quick action saved my life.”
Ms. Rest’s account matched up with additional details about the suspect’s movements that were made public by federal prosecutors on Monday. They said the suspect, Vance Boelter, visited the suburban homes of at least four state legislators in the early hours of Saturday.
At two of the houses, he shot the lawmakers and their spouses. State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, were killed, and State Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife Yvette, were wounded.
The lawmakers who lived at the other two houses were not harmed, prosecutors said. At one of those houses, in Maple Grove, the suspect went to the door dressed as a police officer but found that no one was there, prosecutors said.
In nearby New Hope, a police officer who had heard about the shooting at the Hoffman residence went to Ms. Rest’s residence to check on her safety. That officer spotted the suspect, parked down the street in an S.U.V. resembling a police cruiser, and mistook him for a policeman.
“The officer tried to speak with that man, but he continued staring straight ahead,” the federal charging documents said. An image of the suspect’s vehicle, taken from the New Hope officer’s dash camera, was included with that account.
The charging documents said that the New Hope officer proceeded up the street to Ms. Rest’s house, where other officers joined her. Later, when the officer left the area, the man parked down the block had gone.
Ms. Rest, a state lawmaker since the 1980s, represents an area of suburban Minneapolis that is safely Democratic, and she routinely wins re-election by double-digit margins. She leads the Taxes Committee in the State Senate.
Ms. Rest wrote in a column in a local news outlet last year that she and other Democrats had been working to “secure reproductive freedom, act on climate change, reduce gun violence and strengthen our democracy.”
Federal prosecutors did not identity the state legislator in Maple Grove whose home the suspect was said to have visited. That lawmaker was away on vacation when he visited, prosecutors said.
A spokesman for the Minnesota House Democrats did not immediately respond to questions about that legislator’s identity, and a lawmaker who represents that area did not immediately respond to messages.
Alicia Chen contributed reporting.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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