MPR News entry for RTDNA Murrow Award for Overall Excellence

Fans, famous mourn Prince's death

Prince, the Minnesota-born international superstar whose sound revolutionized pop music and put the Minneapolis scene on the map, was found dead April 21, 2016 at his Paisley Park studios in Chanhassen.

Deputies responding to reports of a medical emergency discovered Prince collapsed and unresponsive in an elevator, the Carver County Sheriff's Office said.

Attempts to revive him with CPR failed. He was pronounced dead at 10:07 a.m.

Tributes poured in almost immediately as the news ricocheted around the world and people poured out their shock and grief on social media. Fans gathered in the morning rain outside Paisley Park and put up makeshift memorials.

—MPR News Staff | Read the rest of the story | Full coverage.
 

Guled Omar: The path to ISIS and the story you haven't heard

Federal prosecutors have deemed him unfixable. Irredeemable. A man with blood on his hands.

Out of the nine young Twin Cities men who were sentenced in November of 2016 as part of the nation's largest ISIS conspiracy case, Guled Omar, who was at one point the group's leader, received the harshest penalty -- a prison sentence of 35 years.

He may also be the most complex figure among his friends, a potentially dangerous stew of charisma and cunning.

But to Omar and the people who believe in him, it was his sense of idealism and empathy, along with his troubled past, that drove him to want to join a terror group notorious for its cold-blooded executions.

—Laura Yuen | Read the rest of the story | Full coverage.
 

The fatal police shooting of Philando Castile

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man and school cafeteria supervisor, was shot during a traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb. The aftermath was streamed live on Facebook by his girlfriend, prompting widespread protest.

Our live coverage began shortly after the shooting, explored questions of police training and racial disparities in traffic stops and continued through the Ramsey County attorney's unprecedented decision on Nov. 16 to prosecute the officer who shot Castile.

MPR News investigated whether black drivers were disproportionately stopped by the law enforcement agency involved with Castile's death. We analyzed more than 9,000 traffic citations in a five-year period from the St. Anthony police department and focused our investigation on stops in which police had the most discretion to pull someone over. The results were staggering. Out of 650 traffic stops prompted by equipment violations, African-Americans made up 44 percent of those who were cited. Our analysis found a huge racial imbalance as to who was being cited as a result of these discretionary stops.

—MPR News Staff | Read the rest of the story
 

It's an opioid overdose death. But is it a murder?

When Colleen Ronnei found that her son Luke was using heroin, she fought for him. Desperately.

She sent Luke to Hazelden for treatment. She screened his cell phone and blocked suspicious numbers.

She even took to following him when he left the house, which led her to a woman she suspected of selling him heroin from the parking lot of the Southdale Center shopping mall. Colleen wrote down the car's license plate number and description and brought it to police.

When that didn't get a response, she confronted the woman, threatening to ram her car if she kept selling to her son.

"She just looked at me. And I drove off because Luke was afraid," Ronnei said. "'You put me in danger, Mom, and you put yourself in danger when you do that.' I said, 'Luke, you are in danger.'"

Luke fought for his sobriety, but succumbed to a heroin overdose on Jan. 7. The last time his mother saw him, he was snoring in bed before a doctor's appointment. He was 20 years old.

—Jon Collins | Read the rest of the story
 

Being Muslim in Minnesota: Events stoke tension, fear among the faithful

Terrorism fears and presidential politics have fueled a climate of uncertainty for many Muslims in communities around the United States. The tension is felt in Minnesota, where members of the world's fastest-growing religion are a small, but growing segment of the population.

Reports of the terrorist group ISIS and Syrian refugees often lead the news. In a presidential election year, candidates have outlined how they'll tackle extremist groups. Republican front-runner Donald Trump called for shutting down U.S. borders to all Muslims. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton chose to present her counter-terrorism strategy in Minnesota.

And when Republican candidate Ben Carson said he wouldn't support a Muslim as president, 12-year-old Yusuf Dayur of Eden Prairie took to Facebook to respond.

"When I become president, I will respect people of all faiths, all colors and all religions," he said in a video. His video, originally posted on his mom's Facebook page, got more than 250,000 views.

Dayur is one of more than 46,000 Somalis who call Minnesota home, according to data from the state demographer. The Association of Religion Data Archives says Minnesota had at least 45 mosques as of 2010, four times more than a decade earlier.

"Islamophobia is on the rise"

As the number of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa grows, so, it seems, does the fear of Muslims.

"Islamophobia is on the rise," said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations - Minnesota, a nonprofit civil rights group. "There is a great deal of hysteria against Muslims."

—Doualy Xaykaothao | Read the rest of the story
 

St. Cloud chief: 'Lone attacker' drove mall stabbing rampage

A spasm of violence last September at a popular St. Cloud shopping mall left 10 wounded and the suspect dead.

Authorities say Dahir Ahmed Adan, 20, attacked shoppers with a knife before he was confronted and shot by an off-duty police officer.

The violence appeared to be the work of a "lone attacker," officials said the day after the attack, but they were looking at whether it was a potential act of terrorism.

"We haven't uncovered anything that would suggest other than a lone attacker at this point," St. Cloud Police Chief Blair Anderson said at a news conference with Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton. "If that changes, we will be transparent about that."

Adan, a young Somali man dressed as a private security guard, entered the Crossroads Center mall wielding what appeared to be a kitchen knife.

Anderson said the man reportedly made at least one reference to Allah and asked a victim if he or she was Muslim before attacking. The man was shot dead by an off-duty police officer. None of the injured suffered life-threatening wounds.

—MPR News Staff | Read the rest of the story
 

Thousands turn out for last-minute Minnesota Trump rally

Trump backers waited several hours for his personalized 757 jet to pull up in front of the giant hangar doors. In a touch of stagecraft, the New York real estate mogul made his fans wait a few minutes more before appearing at the plane's door with a wave and a double thumbs up.

He then delivered a 40-minute call to action, complete with references to his opponent Hillary Clinton as crooked, the country's leaders as stupid, and the nation's current policies as misguided.

"This election will decide who runs this country, the corrupt political class or you the American people," he said. "She's with them, I'm with you."

—Brian Bakst and Matt Sepic | Read the rest of the story | Full coverage.
 

Without support, Minnesota students left behind at graduation

When Xavier Simmons walked into class in high school, he'd turn his desk backwards, put his head down and go to sleep.

He failed four classes his freshman year. Nobody called him on it, he said — not his mother, not his teachers, not his counselors. He dropped out the next year.

"I didn't think of it as a big deal," Simmons said. "I didn't do what I was supposed to do. I took the wrong path."

One might say Simmons, now 27 and lacking a high school diploma, got what he deserved. He didn't try. But beneath his aloofness was a sense of desperation: He wanted to quit school so he could find work and help his mother pay the bills.

In the end, Simmons, who is African-American, was free to flounder in a state where students of color have some of the lowest graduation rates in the nation.

—Laura Yuen and Brandt Williams | Read the rest of the story | Full Coverage.
 

'I Will Find You': A journalist investigates the life of her rapist

More than 20 years ago, Joanna Connors was raped.

It happened while she was on assignment for a Cleveland newspaper. She was running late for an interview with a playwright at a small theater on the Case Western Reserve University campus. When she arrived, the theater was empty.

Then a young man approached her: He said he was working on the lighting, and invited her to see his work.

She paused. She had a bad feeling. An alarm went off in her head, but "I overwrote it because I wanted to be polite," she told MPR News host Kerri Miller. She followed him to the stage, where he pulled out a knife and raped her. Connors wasn't sure if he would kill her or not; the assault lasted for an hour.

Her attacker was arrested the next day, but Connors' ordeal was not over.

When she first met with the prosecutor to go over the case, the prosecutor asked Connors' husband to leave the room. "Then he leveled his gaze at me and said: 'Why the hell did you go into that theater?'"

"[The question] is infuriating to me now. At the time, it was devastating. I was already blaming myself. I was late, it was all my fault — which is a very common response by rape survivors, taking the blame for it," Connors said. "I went home and I sobbed and sobbed, and people continued to tell me it wasn't my fault, but that just cemented in my mind that it was my fault."

In her memoir, "I Will Find You," Connors describes in honest and painstaking detail the aftermath of the rape and her life after the trial. Her rapist was convicted, but her life was forever altered.

—MPR News Staff | Read the rest of the story Full coverage.
 

Dogs as sentinels: Blue-green algae brings toxic mystery to Minn. waters

Layla was an energetic 4-year-old springer spaniel just reaching her prime. Jack Lundbohm figures she would have been the perfect dog for last fall's grouse-hunting season.

But Layla died one day last August, after splashing along the shore of Lake of the Woods for nearly two hours. She had been playing with Lundbohm's 5-year-old grandson, Gus, and not long after the boy took a break from throwing sticks and tennis balls, Layla "was not only dead but as rigid as a bronze statue," Lundbohm said.

She was the 18th dog in Minnesota to have died from suspected blue-green algae poisoning since the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency started tracking the issue a little more than a decade ago.

Last summer, the state recorded its first two cases of human illness linked to toxic algae.

Sickness and death from blue-green algae are troubling, though rare. But the lake conditions that increase the chances of seeing both are not.

Across Minnesota each summer, sky-blue waters transform into pea-green soup, a sign of possible toxins. It's happening more often — and farther north — than ever before, suggesting that climate change is a key player.

The oldest life forms on the planet

Biologists in the state say they're even beginning to see blooms of blue-green algae on northern lakes so remote that you'd have to carry a canoe several miles to reach them.

Wilderness spots far removed from most human interaction have typically been safe from such toxic blooms — until now.

"The fingers do start pointing to climate change and how that is changing how our lakes are behaving to produce blue-green algal blooms," said Mark Edlund, a biologist with the Science Museum of Minnesota's St. Croix Watershed Research Station.

—Elizabeth Dunbar | Read the rest of the story
 

This St. Paul summer camp teaches on race, history

Students with the youth leadership group Dare 2 Be Real took a nighttime trip through the woods last August for a simulation of the Underground Railroad, the early 1800s network of safe houses and routes that guided slaves to free states and Canada.

—Solvejg Wastvedt| Read the rest of the story
 

Mine layoffs bring new calls to remake Iron Range economy, but into what?

Whenever the longstanding and elusive goal of economic diversification is brought up on the Iron Range, inevitably someone will bring up the story of the chopsticks factory.

"I have to chuckle, in my time as commissioner, I'd just ask, name a success, name a failure. And chopsticks factory always comes up," said Tony Sertich, former commissioner of the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board.

The story goes back to the 1980s, when the Iron Range was reeling. About 10,000 mine workers had lost their jobs, more than 60 percent of the mining workforce. The region was desperate for new jobs.

So the IRRRB, with backing from then-Governor and Iron Range native Rudy Perpich, kicked in about $3 million to help a Canadian company build a factory in Hibbing to make chopsticks for export to Japan. It was supposed to create over a hundred jobs.

Yet two years later, the factory was closed. And even though that happened when "I was in middle school," as Sertich, who now heads the Northland Foundation, recalled, it's still held up as almost a folk legend of failure when it comes to efforts over the past several decades to diversify the Iron Range's economy beyond just iron mining.

But that effort is finding renewed focus on the Iron Range now, as the region grapples with the latest dip in the boom-and-bust roller coaster of a mining-based economy. Nearly 2,000 mineworkers have been laid off over the past year, with hundreds, if not thousands, more laid off from businesses that rely on the mines.

—Dan Kraker| Read the rest of the story
 

Searching for Bigfoot in northern Minnesota

Mike Hexum says he first saw Bigfoot from a homemade deer stand on Minnesota's Iron Range. He was 14 years old then, old enough for his father to send him alone into the woods with a sandwich and a rifle.

"He walked into a shooting lane 30 feet in front of me," Hexum recalls. "I thought it was a guy. A big dark guy with a prehistoric face on it. Of course I freaked out. I couldn't get out of the woods fast enough.

He told his father what he saw, and his father told him never to talk about it.

"He said it would embarrass the family," Hexum says.

So Hexum went on with his life. He got out of high school, moved away and got married. He had three kids, and he didn't talk about Bigfoot. For a long time, he says, he forgot what he'd seen.

But the marriage didn't work out, and a few years ago he was laid off from his welding job.

He moved back to a small cabin in the woods, near his childhood home and started watching TV shows about Bigfoot. Then one morning, he says, he saw Bigfoot again.

"The place I live, I didn't have any running water," he says. "So I had a ritual every morning of going down on the lake. I had a hole in the ice for getting water for dishes and washing and I'd bring some coffee and watch the sun come up."

He says a tall hairy creature was walking on the ice that winter morning, far out across the lake. That's when he started to remember his childhood experience — when he started to believe.

—John Enger| Read the rest of the story
 

Entry for Best Newscast from MPR News

On April 21, 2016, Minnesota's music icon Prince was found dead in his Paisley Park studios at the age of 57. Music fans around the world were stunned and devastated.

Our 3 p.m. newscast, just hours after the news broke, led with Prince's death. Reporter Tim Nelson reported live from the scene, host Tom Crann interviewed music producer Jimmy Jam and talked to music reporter Andrea Swensson, who hosts The Local Show on our sister station The Current and developed a friendship with Prince.

Our newscast also included the latest installment in our series, Minnesota's Opioid Epidemic. We aired the story of former drug dealer James Cross, who's trying to help heroin users in his American Indian community, followed by an interview with Winona Strom, American Indian Patient Advocate at Hennepin County Medical Center.