How a Minnesota youth transformed from evangelist to shooting suspect

Vance Boelter grew up in a sports-loving Lutheran family in a small Minnesota town where nobody locked their doors - a background that gave little hint of the zealotry to come or the deadly violence of which he is now accused.

At 17, he had a religious conversion. As he recalled decades later during a passionate sermon overseas, what happened next shook his life. Waving a Bible and thundering from the podium, he spoke about meeting the Holy Spirit and running off pamphlets about Jesus to give to everyone he knew.

“So often in the world today, everyone wants an excuse for not doing the right thing. We want to blame someone else,” he preached in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as seen in a video posted online. “God doesn’t say, ‘Oh, your parents messed up, I know you came into this world all troubled.’ … You have a choice, you have a decision.”

Friends and neighbours of the 57-year-old say they are struggling to understand what drove him to allegedly masquerade as a police officer and shoot two state legislators and their spouses in the predawn hours of Saturday - leaving state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband dead and the other couple seriously injured. Some point to his teenage conversion and the startling change that followed, one that became very public in Sleepy Eye, a burg of about 3,500 about two hours southwest of Minneapolis.

Through much of high school, Boelter was like every other teen, according to lifelong friend David Carlson. But after Boelter declared himself a born-again Christian, he began preaching in the local park - even living there in a tent, Carlson said.

“Everything in his life - he just changed,” Carlson said Sunday. “People were saying, ‘Yeah, Vance is in the park preaching.’ He was just trying to spread the word about Jesus.”

Boelter grew up one of five siblings in a family that was locally famous for baseball - his father, Donald, was the high school coach and later selected for the Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. They lived in a turreted, two-story house on a corner lot in a neighbourhood where American flags fly from porches and flagpoles.

In his senior year, Boelter was named “Most Courteous” and “Most Friendly,” according to images from his high school yearbook shared by a former classmate. It listed him as captain of the basketball team and a member of the baseball team, football team and chorus.

“Vance was an ordinary kid from a middle-class background," said Wendel Lamason, who was friends with Boelter until he moved to another town in eighth grade.

The family was part of mainstream Lutheran churches, and the elder Boelter was active in church leadership. Ron Freimark, who pastored a different Lutheran congregation in Sleepy Eye, remembers the boy participating in church youth groups.

“He wasn’t rebellious. He was polite and all that,” Freimark said Monday afternoon. “He was just a good kid.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, Boelter went on to attend St. Cloud State University and graduated with a degree in international relations.

On a now-defunct website for Revoformation, a nonprofit he founded several years later, Boelter laid out a basic biography and said he had been “ordained” in 1993. He said he had gone to a small Catholic college near Milwaukee - Cardinal Stritch, which is now closed - as well as Christ for the Nations Institute, a Dallas school that is part of the broad, nondenominational world of charismatic Christianity.

And, the bio claimed, he had made trips overseas to seek out “militant Islamists” to “tell them violence wasn’t the answer.”

Christ for the Nations was founded in 1970 by Gordon Lindsay, a prominent preacher in independent, charismatic Christianity. The focus of the movement initially was on evangelizing, faith healing and experiential worship such as speaking in tongues. In the last quarter-century, however, a segment of it turned to politics and changing policies, especially around abortion.

A Lindsay quote long posted in the school’s lobby reads: “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”

The exhortation, the school said Monday, described prayer that should be “intense, fervent and passionate.”

In a statement, it confirmed Boelter had graduated in 1990 with a degree in practical theology in leadership and pastoral and said it was “aghast and horrified” at the news that the alum was a suspect in the weekend shootings.

“This is not who we are,” the statement said. “We have been training Christian servant leaders for 55 years and they have been agents of good, not evil.”

Based on his recent online presence, Boelter’s views now appear to align with the political “far right” of Christianity in the United States, said Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.

The followers of this kind of charismatic Christianity believe in a need “to fight back” against demons and satanic evil in the world, Taylor said. Its core disseminates “very extreme” rhetoric about abortion, he added, with some leaders portraying it as a form of child sacrifice that empowers demons.

Boelter “seems very much to embrace some of the violent rhetoric and ideas that circulate through those spaces,” Taylor said.

Indeed, in another sermon posted online, Boelter said God was sending people to America for a specific purpose.

“They don’t know abortion is wrong, many churches,” he said. “When the body starts moving in the wrong direction … God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.”

In and around Minneapolis, Boelter spent most of his career in the food industry while, as Carlson put it, dreaming of launching a security business. A former neighbor in Sleepy Eye said Boelter, his wife and their children - four girls and a boy - moved back there around 2008 when he took a job as a production coordinator for the local Del Monte plant.

The family bought a three-bedroom fixer-upper on Maple Street and spent their time at the public pool or hosting Bible studies, said the neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. Boelter’s wife, Jenny, was a stay-at-home mom who always had a smile on her face and brought apple pies over around the holidays, the neighbor said.

“They were friendly, almost too friendly,” he said. “It was almost like there was never anything wrong.”

Flags for the fallen lawmakers were at half-staff Monday in Sleepy Eye, a town named for a famous Native American Dakota chief from the 1800s. The business stretch of Main Street goes about five blocks, with several historical buildings and a repurposed movie theater, its marquee promoting a coffee shop and brewing company. Drive just a bit farther and the flat Midwestern landscape is dotted with farms and silver grain bins.

Beki Gewerth, a lifelong resident, said that Boelter’s mother still lives in a nursing home up the street and that most everybody around knows the family.

“They’re very well-liked,” Gewerth said. “To hear what happened … what the heck.”