MINNEAPOLIS — One woman is dead and 14 people wounded in an early morning shootout at a St. Paul bar, the largest mass shooting in the city in recent history.
Shortly after midnight Sunday morning, police said people began "frantically" calling 911 and begging for help. Police arrived to a chaotic scene at Seventh Street Truck Park, a busy bar and food hall on the 200 block of Seventh Street West, to find more than a dozen gunshot victims. A woman in her 20s was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.
"My heart breaks for the woman who was killed, her loved ones and everyone else who was in that bar this morning," said St. Paul Chief of Police Todd Axtell in a statement. "In an instant, they found themselves caught in a hellish situation. I want them to know that we have the best investigators in the country, and we won't stop until we find the people responsible for this madness. We will do our part to hold them accountable."
No arrests have been made and the shooting remains under investigation.
Police spokesman Steve Linders said the department is summoning all resources to find the suspects responsible for this "deeply tragic" and highly unusual shooting for St. Paul. Linders said he was not aware of any recent calls for police service to Seventh Street Truck Park.
The shooting occurred in a popular restaurant and bar district along West Seventh Street, about a block from the Xcel Energy Center. The street is home to longtime restaurants and bars such as Cossetta, Mancini's Char House and Patrick McGovern's Pub. In recent years, the neighborhood has been in the midst of a building boom, with several upscale apartment and condo buildings sprouting up, along with new breweries, restaurants and bars, like the Truck Park.
"It's just not on our radar as a spot where we see this type of thing," Linders said. "We don't see this type of thing anywhere."
DJ Peter Parker, radio host at the former GO 95.3 station, said he has done a show at Truck Park every Saturday for the past four months. He's been doing shows for two decades across the country in cities known for violence like Baltimore, Boston and D.C. But he's never had to dive off a stage to avoid gunfire.
"I've never had anybody shoot inside a party ever," he said. "Especially in a place we felt was a very safe place. This was ... horrific."
Parker said he was reading the room from the stage and didn't see a scuffle or altercation leading up to the shooting. "You can sense when there's going to be a fight," he said. But Saturday night was a good crowd, with "college vibes" and mostly young women.
"It was a fun night and then it went horribly left abruptly. Nobody could've anticipated what happened," he said. "It happened in a way that didn't really make sense. All I heard was mad shots."
Parker said around 12:15 a.m., a dozen or so shots went off and everyone dropped to the ground. He cut the music and heard everyone screaming. Within seconds, the crowd ran outside of the bar and he saw several people on the floor including the woman who was killed.
The aftermath outside, he said, was "chaos."
"It was a bad scene because there is so many people who got shot," he said. "My heart is broken for the girl who died."
The woman's death is the 32nd homicide in St. Paul this year. In 2020, the city matched its one-year record with 34 homicides, the same number as 1992.
Northbound Seven Street was reduced to one lane Sunday morning right outside the Truck Park as a yellow crime scene barricade stretched from Chestnut Street to the sidewalk right outside Hampton Inn and Suites.
Outside the Truck Park, debris of leaves and plastic cups littered the cordoned-off sidewalk. A St. Paul Police forensics van parked inside the barricade along with several other vehicles left there from Saturday night. People out on morning walks and in Minnesota Vikings gear headed to watch the game passed by the scene taking pictures and pointing.
On a Sunday morning walk with her labradoodle Shiloh, Amber Remackel was so overcome with emotion that she sat at a table outside Cossetta and wept. The mother and school counselor said she's lived in the neighborhood for the past six years and has never seen such violence.
"It's way too close to home," she said, wiping away tears.
Remackel said she just picked up her 21-year-old daughter and a group of Iowa State University friends on Friday night from the Truck Park. "It's a fun place to be in St. Paul," she said of the bar, which is always packed on weekends.
"I walk this neighborhood at all times of the night with my dog and never felt unsafe," she said.
Dave Cossetta, owner of the restaurant that's been in the neighborhood since 1911 and on West Seventh Street since the 1980s, said crime has been an increasing concern in the area. He said he and other business owners in the area blame the uptick on the Freedom House, a homeless shelter a few blocks away from Cossetta.
"Seventh Street has become a lot more dangerous lately," Cossetta said. "There's been a lot of issues more than ever and that's pretty much the way it's been for over a year. I don't know the circumstances across the street but it's been a common theme lately."
Cossetta said there have been confrontations outside his restaurant and he said guys have pulled knives on people in broad daylight.
"It's scary," he said. "There's stuff going on in the day. In the nighttime it only accelerates."
He said city officials have not listened to local business owners' concerns about the recent wave in criminal activity.
Molly Jalma, executive director of the Listening House, which operates the Freedom House in the former fire station on West Seventh Street, said she spoke with the shelter's off-duty police officer who worked Saturday night and said Freedom House guests had no involvement with the shooting.
"This wasn't an issue of people who are unsheltered," she said. "This is an issue of gun violence."
Linders said his partner in the department for 15 years "can't remember anything like this in her tenure."
"We have a very busy bar, a lot of people just enjoying themselves and then we had a few individuals who decided to pull out guns and pull the trigger indiscriminately, with no regard for human life ... It's nothing short of a tragedy."
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter released a statement Sunday morning saying the community "is devastated by the shocking scene from last night."
As police continue to investigate, "our work to build more proactive and comprehensive public safety strategies is more urgent than ever," he said. "We will never accept violence in our community."
U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, who represents St. Paul, issued a statement saying, "the epidemic of gun violence plaguing the Twin Cities has hit us in St. Paul with a mass shooting event that can only be described as a horror."
She said her prayers are with the victims and pledged her support to the St. Paul Police.
"I am committed to keeping St. Paul safe and that means working with all community leaders to get guns off our streets and out of the hands of criminals," she said. "We must never allow this kind of criminal act to happen again."
———
