Firearms seller Fleet Farm ignored employee alerts for straw purchases, documents show
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Newly released documents show firearms retailer Fleet Farm ignored employee warnings about suspected straw purchases, including sales tied to a gun later used in a fatal St. Paul shooting.
Straw purchasing, which is the act of purchasing a firearm or ammunition on behalf of someone who is not allowed to own them, is illegal.
Attorney General Keith Ellison's office sued Fleet Farm in 2022, alleging that the retailer negligently sold firearms to straw buyers. Ellison’s lawsuit pointed to 37 firearms purchased by two straw buyers over the course of 16 months. Fleet Farm settled for $1 million in February.
Now, the Attorney General’s office is releasing 694 documents related to the litigation, which Fleet Farm had to turn over as part of the settlement. The trove will be hosted in the University of California, San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library.
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Sales linked to a fatal shooting
The documents show that Fleet Farm firearms compliance specialist Michelle Granato never answered an email from employee Cory Klebs flagging a series of purchases he deemed suspicious in July 2021.
The purchases were made within a week by straw purchaser Jerome Horton. Three months later, one of the guns Fleet Farm sold Horton was used in a shootout in St. Paul’s Truck Park. Marquisha Wiley, 27, was killed in the shooting, and 14 others were injured.
‘’It’s possible that the mass shooting at the truck park bar might not have happened if Fleet Farm had stopped the sale of guns to Horton on July 31, and then Marquisha Wiley might still be with us,” said Eric Maloney, an employee in the Attorney General’s office, at a press conference on Wednesday.
After the shooting, Minnesota’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) informed Fleet Farm that Horton was a straw buyer. In a deposition, Granato said she had never heard that anyone had suspicions about Horton’s purchases before ATF warned the company.
Transparency efforts
Ellison presented the document release as an effort to increase transparency and protect the public. UCSF’s Industry Document Library hosts litigation documents linked to the tobacco, opioid and fossil fuel industries, among others.
“Learning and seeing what industry actors are doing or not is an essential part to making sure that we have better public safety outcomes in this country, and here in Minnesota,” Tim Daly, president of the Firearms Accountability Initiative, said.
He said releasing internal documents was an important step to increase industry actors’ accountability to the public.
“It is in the industry actor's own words, and that I think is exceptionally powerful, and will be necessary to change people's perceptions about bad actors' culpability for gun violence that's happening in our communities,” Daly added.
One of the conditions for the settlement was that Fleet Farm implement new monitoring and employee training to prevent and flag straw purchases.
