When the gunman in the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers approached their homes early on Saturday morning, he was armed with not just a handgun but also a wealth of other gear: a black tactical vest, a badge, a flashlight, a Taser. He arrived in a black S.U.V. with flashing police lights.
“No question, if they were in this room, you would assume they were a police officer,” Mark Bruley, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, Minn., said not long after the shootings, as officers searched for a suspect.
On Monday, state and federal authorities investigating the case filed murder and other charges against Vance Boelter, a Minnesota resident who was in the process of starting his own private security company.
The killings were the latest in a long history of crimes committed by people who won the trust of victims by posing as law enforcement officers. Among the more well-known cases was a prank caller who posed as a police officer to convince a McDonald’s manager in Kentucky to strip search an employee in 2004, and a man who was convicted of murdering a Long Island man in 2005 after pulling him over on the road with flashing lights on his S.U.V.
And this year, amid high-profile immigration raids conducted by federal authorities, several people have been arrested and accused of impersonating Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in order to threaten and intimidate others.
In the Minnesota shootings this weekend, officials said, the suspect was even able to fool a real officer.
Officials said Mr. Boelter had initially presented himself as a police officer when he went to four lawmakers’ homes in the Minneapolis suburbs early on Saturday, fatally shooting one lawmaker and her husband and wounding another lawmaker and his wife.
Mr. Boelter, 57, was spotted in his vehicle near another lawmaker’s home when a police officer who had been assigned to provide extra security at the home pulled alongside him and tried to speak with him. Mr. Boelter did not respond, and the officer, who assumed that Mr. Boelter was also a law enforcement officer, continued on to the lawmaker’s home, prosecutors said. Mr. Boelter did not end up going to the door of that house.
But two of the victims were able to see through the disguise, officials said.
When the suspect approached the home of State Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, he identified himself as a police officer and shined a light in their faces, prosecutors said. When he lowered the flashlight, the couple saw that he was wearing a mask and realized he was not a police officer.
“You’re not a cop,” they said, according to Joseph H. Thompson, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota. Mr. Boelter then responded, “This is a robbery,” and began forcing his way in, ultimately shooting them both, according to the criminal complaint.
Police officials said it was disturbing to see people misrepresenting themselves as police officers in order to carry out crimes.
The suspect “exploited the trust our uniforms are meant to represent,” said Bob Jacobson, the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. “That betrayal was deeply disturbing to those of us who wear the badge with honor and responsibility.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice. He is from upstate New York.
The post Minnesota Assassin Posed as Police Officer to Carry Out Shootings appeared first on New York Times.
