Killings of Burnsville first responders happened at time of increased assaults on law enforcement

Mara H. Gottfried, Pioneer Press
Updated ·11 min read
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In the days since a gunman killed two Burnsville police officers and a firefighter, people have been asking White Bear Lake officer Ryan Sheak how he’s doing.

A year ago, a man shot Sheak when he and other White Bear Lake officers went to arrest the man on a felony warrant. After undergoing surgery, Sheak returned to work about six months later, though he’s still recovering from his injuries.

Sheak said he’s been telling the people who’ve been checking on him: “I’m just so thankful and grateful to be where I am because obviously, as we’ve seen this week, it could have went a different direction for me.”

As he and other first responders grieve the lives lost of Burnsville officers Matthew Ruge and Paul Elmstrand and firefighter/paramedic Adam Finseth, they’re also reflecting on the dangers of their work.

Assaults on law enforcement in Minnesota have been climbing in recent years — they were up 152 percent last year compared to 2019.

On average, 388 officers were assaulted each year in the decade up to 2019. There have been an average of 1,041 assaults per year between 2020 and 2023, according to a Pioneer Press analysis of Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension data from local law enforcement agencies.

Most of the assaults resulted in minor or no injuries, but some officers paid the ultimate price. Since January 2023, nine first responders have been fatally shot in the region and 16 have been wounded by gunfire.

“Policing across this country to protect a free society isn’t getting any easier,” Burnsville police officer Mark Hetherington, who’s been in law enforcement for 27 years, told a crowd at a vigil in Burnsville on Tuesday. “We need everyone to be on board to keep us safe, to keep our schools safe, to keep our people safe. We have to unite. The rhetoric sometimes is unnecessary.”

Various reasons cited for increase

People in the field cited various reasons why they believe attacks on officers have increased — worsening tensions, particularly since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020; an increase in violent crime, now on the decline, that affects community members and also officers; more guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them because they’re felons or mentally ill; and a sense that there aren’t serious consequences for crime, leading to people feeling emboldened.

Todd Axtell, who was St. Paul police chief until 2022, said he sees animosity toward law enforcement increase when body camera or cellphone videos of “ugly incidents” between police and the public “whip through social media like wildfire.”

“People forget there’s a person behind that badge,” Axtell said. “Police officers do what every one of us, whether we’re a police chief, politician, journalist, resident or reformer, not only asked them to do, but also need them to do. History has taught us that awful things happen when we only see the bad in people. We’ve seen entirely too many awful things lately.”

Sheak, who has been a White Bear Lake officer for seven years, said “everything changed” after the 2020 civil unrest. Previously, “there was a lot more respect and understanding regarding our profession,” he said. Now, he said they encounter more people who are uncooperative and disrespectful, and law enforcement is “villainized” with a broad brush.

He said conversations between law enforcement and people who don’t understand the profession could help.

“If any people want to talk to me, they’ll see I’m just a normal human being; I’m a husband, I’m a father, I give back to my community,” he said.

Justin Nix, associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, has studied fatal and non-fatal firearm assaults against officers across the country. He and other researchers found a three-week spike in firearm assaults on police after Floyd was killed, “after which the trend in firearms assaults dropped to levels only slightly above that which were predicted by pre-Floyd data,” according to their paper published in the journal Criminology.

“Since the popularization of the ‘war on cops’ narrative after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., no research has found evidence that this killing led to a significant increase in violence against police,” they wrote in their paper. “… (I)t remains possible that other high-profile police killings might lead to a concentrated increase in the more general phenomenon of ‘retaliatory violence.'”

Nix said last year that there has been a slow uptick nationally in the number of firearm assaults on officers since 2018, which “closely mirrors changes in community violence that we’ve seen in the last few years, where there have been more homicides and more shootings” than five to 10 years ago.

Shootings during domestic incidents

The Burnsville first responders were killed Feb. 18 after police received a report about a “domestic incident,” according to the BCA. Officers responded to a 911 call about 1:50 a.m. “regarding an alleged sexual assault,” a BCA agent wrote in an application for a search warrant.

Three of 12 incidents of shootings of first responders in the region since January 2023 happened when they were responding to domestic disturbances — the Burnsville incident, during which a sergeant was also shot and injured; a St. Paul shooting in December when an officer was wounded in the leg; and the April killing of Pope County sheriff’s Deputy Josh Owen, 44, during which another deputy and an officer were shot and wounded.

Thirty percent of all assaults on officers in Minnesota since 2021 happened when they were responding to a disturbance call, which includes reports of family quarrels, people with a firearm and other calls for service, according to BCA data.

Although people have long said domestic disturbances are the deadliest for officers, Nix and other researchers found in analyzing national 2016 data that domestic incidents “were considerably less likely to result in officers being assaulted or injured/killed.”

“We can’t be sure why the numbers look this way,” Nix wrote in a summary. “It could be that domestics are in fact far less dangerous than non-domestics. Or, it could be that officers have been trained and socialized to take extra precautions on these calls, which offsets any increased danger.”

In Burnsville, officers who responded to the home in the 12600 block of 33rd Avenue South spoke with Shannon Gooden, 38, who wouldn’t leave the residence but said he was unarmed. He said he had children inside. BCA officials previously said there were seven children, ages 2 to 15, in the home.

Officers went inside and negotiated with Gooden for about 3½ hours, trying to get him to surrender peacefully, but he opened fire at 5:26 a.m. on the officers inside the home “without warning,” according to the BCA.

Gooden continued firing after the officers retreated outside, and he shot Finseth as the firefighter/paramedic tried to aid the officers. Gooden shot more than 100 rifle rounds at law enforcement and first responders, the BCA said. Burnsville police Sgt. Adam Medlicott was shot and injured, and is now recovering.

White Bear Lake officer’s recovery

The next most common situation in which officers are assaulted — in 21 percent of cases in Minnesota since 2021 — are attempting other arrests, which the BCA said includes carrying out arrest and search warrants. That was the case in one fatal shooting in the region and nine officers injured in shootings since January 2023.

On Jan. 24, 2023, Sheak and other officers went to arrest Daniel Loren Holmgren Jr., 34, on a felony warrant in his White Bear Lake apartment.

“After a few minutes of negotiations with him, when he was kind of barricaded in the bedroom, he opened the door and fired at us and I took the rounds,” Sheak recalled.

Sheak was wearing a bullet-resistant vest, but “unfortunately, all the rounds I took were right below the vest,” he said. Holmgren was using a handgun, though rifle fire can penetrate officers’ vests.

Holmgren shot Sheak two or three times in the abdomen and pelvic area — all the shots traveled through his body, exiting on the other side. One round went through his lower back and shattered his sacrum bone — that injury has been the most difficult part of his recovery. The bullet missed Sheak’s spinal cord by about 4 millimeters, he said.

“My legs gave out and then I just went into training mode and survival mode,” Sheak said. His fellow officers dragged him out and to an ambulance. He never lost consciousness. “I was going to call my wife and I didn’t know if this was going to be a good-bye phone call,” but he said after officers looked him over, he realized he would be “for the most part OK.”

Sheak called his wife from the ambulance and spoke to her briefly, telling her: “I love you. Get to the hospital and drive safe.”

Holmgren pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder of a peace officer and received a 19-year sentence.

Sheak returned to work at White Bear Lake in late July, now a full-time detective. It’s been “very therapeutic and healing, both mentally and spiritually, being back with my second family,” he said of being back to work in the city where he grew up.

Sheak’s wife had some apprehension about him returning to police work, he said.

“I’m sure that’s always going to be present for her and the kids,” he said. “These unfortunate reminders like what happened this week hits that reset button and we start all over again” with concerns “and it’s just a stark reality of what could have happened to me.”

Sheak still has lower back pain and stiffness, and goes to physical therapy regularly for his back injury.

His scars aren’t only physical — he started going to therapy to work through what happened, and he’s also leaned on his faith and support from his peers and family. He recommends therapy for all first responders.

“We see things and endure things on a daily basis that we compartmentalize and store away and it’s not healthy, and we need to find a way to release that,” he said.

Sheak was a board member of the Front Line Foundation before he was injured and he still continues in his role. The foundation announced Monday that it is providing $60,000 to the families of the three first responders killed in Burnsville.

Past shootings of law enforcement

Minnesota data shows 7 percent of assaults on officers since 2021 happened during traffic stops or pursuits.

Three officers killed last year in western Wisconsin were on traffic stops. A man shot Cameron officer Hunter Scheel, 23, and Chetek officer Emily Breidenbach, 32, during a traffic stop in Barron County in April. St. Croix County sheriff’s Deputy Kaitie Leising, 29, was fatally shot when she responded to a report of a suspected drunken driver in May.

Fargo, N.D., officers were responding to a traffic crash in July when a man ambushed them, fatally shooting officer Jake Wallin, 23, and seriously wounding two other officers and a passerby.

Around the country, 47 officers were shot and killed in the line of duty last year, compared to 63 officers in 2022, according to preliminary data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. From 2010 through the end of 2020, an average of 53 officers were shot and killed each year, the organization said.

In Minnesota, before Pope County Deputy Owen’s killing last year, the last time an officer was fatally shot was 2021 when Red Lake Nation officer Ryan Bialke, 37, was slain. The next most recent cases of homicide by gunfire were Aitkin County sheriff’s investigator Steven Sandberg, 60, in 2015 and Mendota Heights officer Scott Patrick, 47, in 2014.

Of 3,464 law enforcement officers assaulted in Minnesota since 2021, 92 percent had no injuries or ones that were apparently minor, BCA data show. About 3 percent — 98 officers — had a major injury, possible internal injury, apparent broken bones or severe laceration.

Terrible memories of 1994 St. Paul killings

The killings in Burnsville brought back terrible memories of Aug. 26, 1994, when St. Paul officers Ron Ryan Jr., Tim Jones and K-9 Laser were fatally shot. In total, there were 210 officers assaulted in Minnesota that year (Minneapolis police figures weren’t included).

“The shock, the fear, the sadness — all of those memories — boiled back up, not just for me, but for all members of law enforcement who were impacted by the death of Ron and Tim on that day,” Axtell said of what happened last Sunday. “I know we’re all feeling those same emotions when we hear of these heroes in Burnsville that lost their lives protecting their community.”

Officer and firefighter wellness is always important, and departments having mental health professionals available is essential in times like this, Axtell said.

A look at historic data shows there were also a high number of assaults on officers in Minnesota in 1978, when 560 cases were reported. In 1970, when officer James Sackett Sr., 27, was fatally shot in St. Paul, there were 409 assaults on officers documented throughout Minnesota.

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