Late Sunday night in Green Isle, Minnesota, Wendy Thomas was on the phone with her father when she was someone in a field.
Thomas watched as the person reached a culvert and squatted, she told ABC News affiliate KSTP.
“I was like, Dad, that’s somebody,” she told the outlet. “He said, ‘Hang up and call somebody.’”
Moments later, Thomas was flagging down a member of law enforcement, she said, and telling them about the man she’d seen out by the culvert. What followed was the arrest of a suspect, Vance Boelter, 57, whom local and federal law enforcement had been searching for for about 43 hours.
Boelter, who appeared court on Monday, is suspected of shooting and killing a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband as well as shooting and wounding a second lawmaker and his wife.
Boelter allegedly showed up to their doors in the middle of the night impersonating a police officer and wearing a realistic-looking mask, officials said, noting that two other lawmakers were spared the night of the shootings.
He “stalked his victims like prey” and “shot them in cold blood,” acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Joseph Thompson said at a news conference as he outlined the “chilling” details.
He’s facing federal charges including stalking and firearms charges and state charges including first-degree murder, officials said.
Boelter was arrested Sunday night near his farm in Green Isle shortly after Thomas spotted him. Boelter was armed when he was apprehended in a rural area late Sunday, authorities said, but he was taken into custody without incident.
Boelter allegedly had firearms and a list of 45 elected officials in notebooks in his car, Thompson said.
Law enforcement have yet to describe a potential motive for the shooting. But Minnesota state Sen. Scott Dribble, who worked with Hortman, told ABC News on Monday that he was “very concerned about the nature of the rhetoric that’s occurring with politics, especially among right-wing extremists.”
Dribble pointed to what he saw as a change in recent years for “those at the highest levels to engage in rhetoric of dehumanisation, politicizing instruments of government, politicizing our military, and really calling for a violent response rather than really having vigorous policy debates.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, meanwhile, called for “every elected official of every stripe and party has to turn down the temperature.” Elected representatives and government staffers should in difficult times be displaying their “humanity” and reaching across the aisle, Flanagan told ABC News on Monday.
“Our community, our families, you know, taking care of each other, stepping up for one another. And that needs to continue to be the message during this time of divisive rhetoric,” she said.
The sentiment was echoed by Gov. Tim Walz late on Monday.
“The way our nation moves forward is not through hate. It is not through violence,” Walz said in a statement posted on social media. “It is through humility, and grace, and compassion.”
ABC News’ Emily Shapiro, Pierre Thomas, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, Alexander Mallin and Brittany Shepherd contributed to this report.
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