Roseville homicide suspect caught; broad metro alert sent inadvertently
Boy, 17, suspected of attacking his family, killing one and injuring others
Updated 1:10 p.m.
Roseville police said the homicide suspect who triggered a broad shelter-in-place order Tuesday morning has been captured. All shelter-in-place orders were canceled as of about 11:30 a.m.
The alerts initially warned people to shelter without providing geographic information, generating confusion and concern across a wide swath of the Twin Cities metro area.
Ramsey County officials later said the county “deeply apologizes for the confusion and disruption this morning’s alerts caused throughout the metro region” and is reviewing “why the alert went out to such an excessively broad area.”
Roseville police said the alert helped officers apprehend a 17-year-old boy suspected of attacking his family, killing one person, severely wounding two, and leaving two more with minor injuries.
Create a More Connected Minnesota
MPR News is your trusted resource for the news you need. With your support, MPR News brings accessible, courageous journalism and authentic conversation to everyone - free of paywalls and barriers. Your gift makes a difference.
Alerts sent over period of about 40 minutes
Ramsey County emergency officials said the shelter-in-place warning that lit up cell phones across the region at about 10:52 a.m. was sent to a broader area than intended.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter appeared to have been the first public official to offer more information on social media. At 11:03 a.m. he posted on Twitter “the incident occurred in Roseville near Har Mar Mall and notice inadvertently went out wider than intended. More information forthcoming from City of Roseville.”
A second emergency alert sent to phones around 11:15 a.m. clarified the affected area of Roseville. Authorities said a search was on near Roseville’s Har Mar Mall and called for people to shelter from Larpenteur Avenue to Highway 36 and Victoria Street to Snelling Avenue.
A third phone alert at about 11:30 a.m. reported a suspect was in custody, and the shelter-in-place advisory had been lifted.
Alert helped lead to capture of suspect
In a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Roseville Police Chief Erika Scheider said officers first responded to a call around 10:23 a.m. of a domestic assault near Lexington Avenue N and Roselawn Avenue W.
The teen was suspected of attacking family members in the area before running away, so police set up a perimeter and called in a Minnesota State Patrol aircraft and dogs to search the area.
Police asked Ramsey County’s Emergency Communications Center to send an alert just to the neighborhood within the perimeter, but it was mistakenly sent to a much broader swath, according to Scheider. However, she said someone outside the perimeter got the alert, saw the suspect near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds and called police, who responded to the area and detained the teen.
Although the mistakenly broad alert actually helped police capture the suspect, Scheider acknowledged it was upsetting and said police would look into what went wrong.
“We know that caused a lot of concern, so we certainly will be looking into what happened and make sure that that doesn’t happen again. We know schools went on lockdown. People were really concerned to get that on their phone,” Scheider said.
At least one school district went into lockdown over the alert. St. Paul Public Schools put all schools in lockdown around 11 a.m., lifting the lockdown for some schools by 11:15 a.m. and then for all schools at 11:25 a.m., according to an alert on their website.
Ramsey County apologizes for ‘confusion’
Later Tuesday afternoon, a Ramsey County spokesperson sent a news release saying the county apologizes and “will continue to investigate this issue in the days ahead to identify the cause of the issue and prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.”
County staff programmed the alert only to be sent to cell towers in the neighborhood using the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireless Emergency Alert system, but said as of Tuesday afternoon they do not know why it ended up going to a much broader area.
“Ramsey County is actively reviewing this incident with our staff and state and federal partners to identify why the alert went out to such an excessively broad area,” the statement said.
Watch: Erika Scheider, Roseville’s police chief, briefs reporters Tuesday about the effort to find a homicide suspect that triggered phone alerts across the metro area: